Krymov took a deep breath of cool, damp air. His heart filled with faith and light. The nightmare seemed to be over.
4
Krymov got out of the car and looked round at the narrow grey passage leading into the Lubyanka. His head was buzzing, full of the roar of aeroplane engines, of glimpses of streams, forests and fields, of moments of despair, doubt and self-assurance.
The door opened. He entered an X-ray world of stifling official air and glaring official light. It was a world that existed quite independently of the war, outside it and above it.
He was taken to an empty, stifling room and ordered to strip. The light was as dazzling as a searchlight. A man in a doctor’s smock ran his fingers thoughtfully over Krymov’s body. Krymov twitched; it was clear that the war and all its thunder could never disturb the methodical work of these shameless fingers . . .
A dead soldier, a note in his gas-mask that he’d written before the attack: ‘I died for the Soviet way of life, leaving behind a wife and six children . . .’ A member of a tank-crew who had burned to death – he had been quite black, with tufts of hair still clinging to his young head . . . A people’s army, many millions strong, marching through bogs and forests, firing artillery and machine-guns . . .
Calmly and confidently, the fingers went on with their work . . . They were under enemy fire. Commissar Krymov was shouting: ‘Comrade Generalov, do you not want to defend the Soviet Motherland?’
‘Turn round! Bend down! Legs apart!’
He was photographed in a soldier’s tunic with its collar unbuttoned, full-face and in profile. With almost indecent diligence he pressed his fingerprints onto a sheet of paper. Someone bustled up, removed his belt and cut off his trouser buttons.
He went up in a brightly lit lift and walked down a long carpeted corridor, past a row of doors with round spy holes. They were like the wards of a cancer clinic. The air was warm. It was government air, lit by a mad electric light. This was a Radiological Institute for the Diagnosis of Society . . .
‘Who had me arrested?’
He could hardly even think in this blind, stifling air. Reality and delirium, past and future, were wrestling with each other. He had lost his sense of identity . . . Did I ever have a mother? Maybe not, maybe I never had one. Zhenya no longer mattered. Stars caught in the tops of pine-trees, the ford over the Don, a green German flare, Workers of the World Unite, there must be people behind each door, I’ll remain a Communist to my death, my head’s buzzing, did Grekov really fire at me? Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev, the President of the Comintern, walked down this same corridor, what close, suffocating air, damn this blinding light . . . Grekov fired at me, the man from the Special Section punched me in the jaw, the Germans fired at me, what will happen tomorrow, I swear I’m not guilty, I need a piss, the old men singing songs at Spiridonov’s were quite splendid, the Cheka, the Cheka, the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky had been the first master of this house, then Heinrich Yagoda, then Menzhinsky, then that little proletarian from Petersburg, Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov with the green eyes – and now kind, intelligent Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria . . . Yes, we’ve already met – greetings to you! What was it we sang? ‘Stand up, proletarian, and fight for your cause!’ But I’m not guilty, I need a piss, they’re not really going to shoot me, are they . . . ?
How strange it was to walk down this long, straight corridor. Life itself was so confusing – with all its winding paths, its bogs, streams and ravines, its dust-covered steppes, its unharvested corn . . . You squeezed your way through or made long detours – but fate ran straight as an arrow. Just corridors and corridors and doors in corridors.
Krymov walked at an even pace, neither quick nor slow – as though the guard was walking in front of him, not behind him.
Something had happened. Something had changed the moment he set foot in this building.
‘A geometrical arrangement of points,’ he had said to himself as he had his fingerprints taken. He hadn’t understood these words, but they expressed what had happened.
He was losing himself. If he had asked for water, he would have been given something to drink. If he had collapsed with a heart attack, a doctor would have given him the appropriate injection. But he was no longer Krymov; he didn’t understand this yet, but he could feel it. He was no longer the comrade Krymov who could dress, eat lunch, buy a cinema ticket, think, go to bed – and remain the same person. What distinguished him from everyone else was his soul, his mind, his articles in The Communist International, the fact that he had joined the Party before the Revolution, his various personal habits, the different tones of voice he adopted when he talked to Komsomol members, secretaries of Moscow raykoms, workers, old Party members, friends of his and petitioners. His body was still like any other body; his thoughts and movements were still like anyone else’s thoughts and movements; but his essence, his freedom and dignity had disappeared.
He was taken into a cell – a rectangle with a clean parquet floor and four bunks. The blankets on the bunks had been pulled tight and there were no creases. He at once felt that three human beings were looking with human interest at a fourth human being.
They were people. He didn’t know whether they were good or bad, whether they would be hostile, indifferent or welcoming. All he knew was that their feelings were human feelings.
He sat down on the empty bunk. The three men watched him in silence. They were sitting on their bunks with open books on their knees. Everything he had lost came back to him.
One of the men was quite massive. He had a craggy face and a mass of Beethoven-like curls – some of them quite grey – that swept down over his low, bulging forehead. The second was an old man. His hands were as white as paper, his skull was bald and gaunt, and his face was like a metal bas-relief. What flowed in his veins and arteries might have been snow rather than blood. The third, Krymov’s neighbour, had just taken off his spectacles and had a red mark on the bridge of his nose. He looked kind, friendly and unhappy. He pointed at the door, gave a faint smile and shook his head. Krymov understood: the guard was still looking through the spy-hole and they should keep quiet.
The man with the dishevelled hair spoke first.
‘Well,’ he said in a good-natured drawl, ‘on behalf of our community let me welcome the armed forces. Where have you just come from, comrade?’
‘Stalingrad,’ said Krymov with an embarrassed smile.
‘Oh! I’m glad to meet someone who’s taken part in our heroic resistance. Welcome to our hut!’
‘Do you smoke?’ the white-faced old man asked hurriedly.
‘Yes.’
The old man nodded and stared at his book.
‘It’s because I let the two of them down,’ Krymov’s kindly neighbour explained. ‘I said I didn’t smoke. Otherwise they could have had my ration themselves. But tell me – how long is it since you left Stalingrad?’
‘I was there this morning.’
‘I see,’ said the giant. ‘You were brought here by Douglas?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Tell us about Stalingrad. We haven’t managed to get any papers yet.’
‘You must be hungry,’ said Krymov’s neighbour. ‘We’ve already had supper here.’
‘I don’t want anything to eat,’ replied Krymov. ‘And the Germans aren’t going to take Stalingrad. That’s quite clear.’
‘That always was clear,’ said the giant. ‘The synagogue stands and will continue to stand.’
The old man closed his book with a bang.
‘You must be a member of the Communist Party?’
‘Yes, I am a Communist.’
‘Sh! Sh! You must always whisper,’ said Krymov’s neighbour.
‘Even about being a Party member,’ added the giant.
The giant’s face seemed familiar. Finally Krymov remembered him. He was a famous Moscow compere. He and Zhenya had once seen him on stage during a concert in the Hall of Columns.
The door opened. A guard looked in.
; ‘Anyone whose name begins with K?’
‘Yes,’ answered the giant. ‘Katsenelenbogen.’
He got up, brushed back his dishevelled hair with one hand and walked unhurriedly to the door.
‘He’s being interrogated,’ whispered Krymov’s neighbour.
‘Why “Anyone whose name begins with K”?’
‘It’s a rule of theirs. Yesterday the guard called out, “Any Katsenelenbogen whose name begins with K?” It was quite funny. He’s a bit cracked.’
‘Yes, we had a good laugh,’ said the old man.
‘I wonder what they put you inside for,’ thought Krymov. And then: ‘My name begins with K too.’
The prisoners got ready to go to sleep. The light continued to glare down; Krymov could feel someone watching through the spy-hole as he unwound his foot-cloths, pulled up his pants and scratched his chest. It was a very special light; it was there not so that they could see, but so that they could be seen. If it had been found more convenient to observe them in darkness, they would have been kept in darkness.
The old man – Krymov imagined him to be an accountant – was lying with his face to the wall. Krymov and his neighbour were talking in whispers; they didn’t look at one another and they kept their hands over their mouths. Now and again they glanced at the empty bunk. Was the compere still cracking jokes?
‘We’ve all become as timid as hares,’ whispered Krymov’s neighbour. ‘It’s like in a fairy-tale. A sorcerer touches someone – and suddenly he grows the ears of a hare.’
He told Krymov about the other two men in the cell. The old man, Dreling, turned out to be either a Social Revolutionary, a Social Democrat or a Menshevik. Krymov had come across his name before. He had spent over twenty years in prisons and camps; soon he’d have done longer than the prisoners in the Schlüsselburg in the last century. He was back in Moscow because of a new charge that had been brought against him: he’d taken it into his head to give lectures on the agrarian question to the kulaks in his camp.
The compere’s experience of the Lubyanka was equally impressive. Over twenty years before, he’d begun working in Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka. He had then worked under Yagoda in the OGPU, under Yezhov in the NKVD and under Beria in the MGB. Part of the time he had worked in the central apparatus; part of the time he had been at the camps, in charge of huge construction projects.
Krymov’s neighbour was called Bogoleev. Krymov had imagined him to be a minor official; in fact he was an art historian who worked in the reserve collection of a museum. He also wrote poetry that was considered out of key with the times and had never been published.
‘But that’s all finished with,’ whispered Bogoleev. ‘Now I’m just a timid little hare.’
How strange it all was. Once there had been nothing except the crossing of the Bug and the Dnieper, the encirclement of Piryatinsk, the Ovruch marshes, Mamayev Kurgan, house number 6/1, political reports, shortages of ammunition, wounded political instructors, night attacks, political work on the march and in battle, the registration of guns, tank raids, mortars, General Staffs, heavy machine-guns . . .
And at the same time there had been nothing but night interrogations, inspections, reveilles, visits to the lavatory under escort, carefully rationed cigarettes, searches, personal confrontations with witnesses, investigators, sentences decreed by a Special Commission . . .
These two realities had co-existed.
But why did it seem natural, even inevitable, that his neighbours should be confined within a cell in the Lubyanka? And why did it seem senseless, quite inconceivable that he should be confined in the same cell, that he should now be sitting on this bunk?
Krymov wanted desperately to talk about himself. In the end he gave in and said:
‘My wife’s left me. No one’s going to send me any parcels.’
The bunk belonging to the enormous Chekist remained empty till morning.
5
One night before the war, Krymov had walked past the Lubyanka and tried to guess what was going on inside that sleepless building. After being arrested, people would be kept there for eight months, a year, a year and a half – until the investigation had been completed. Their relatives would then receive letters from camps and see the words Komi, Salekhard, Norilsk, Kotlas, Magadan, Vorkuta, Kolyma, Kuznetsk, Krasnoyarsk, Karaganda, Bukhta Nagaevo . . .
But many thousands would disappear for ever after their spell in the Lubyanka. The Public Prosecutor’s office would inform their relatives that they had been sentenced to ‘ten years without right of correspondence’. But no one in the camps ever met anyone who had received this sentence. What it meant was: ‘shot’.
When a man wrote to his relatives from a camp, he would say that he was feeling well, that it was nice and warm, and could they, if possible, send him some garlic and onions. His relatives would understand that this was in order to prevent scurvy. Never did anyone write so much as a word about his time in the Lubyanka.
It had been especially terrible to walk down Komsomolskiy Alley and Lubyanka Street during the summer nights of 1937 . . .
The dark, stifling streets were deserted. For all the thousands of people inside, the buildings seemed quite dead; they were dark and the windows were wide open. The silence was anything but peaceful. A few windows were lit up; you could glimpse faint shadows through the white curtains. From the main entrance came the glare of headlights and the sound of car-doors being slammed. The whole city seemed to be pinned down, fascinated by the glassy stare of the Lubyanka. Krymov had thought about various people he knew. Their distance from him was something that couldn’t even be measured in space – they existed in another dimension. No power on earth or in heaven could bridge this abyss, an abyss as profound as death itself. But these people weren’t yet lying under a nailed-down coffin-lid – they were here beside him, alive and breathing, thinking, weeping.
The cars continued to bring in more prisoners. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of prisoners disappeared into the Inner Prisons, behind the doors of the Lubyanka, the Butyrka and the Lefortovo.
New people came forward to replace those who had been arrested – in raykoms, Peoples’ Commissariats, War Departments, the office of the Public Prosecutor, industrial enterprises, surgeries, trade-union committees, land departments, bacteriological laboratories, theatre managements, aircraft-design offices, institutes designing vast chemical and metallurgical factories.
Sometimes the people who had replaced the arrested terrorists, saboteurs and enemies of the people were arrested as enemies of the people themselves. Sometimes the third wave of appointments was arrested in its turn.
A Party member from Leningrad had told Krymov in a whisper how he had once shared a cell with three ex-secretaries of the same Leningrad raykom; each had unmasked his predecessor as a terrorist and enemy of the people. They had lain side by side, apparently without the least ill-feeling.
Dmitry Shaposhnikov, Yevgenia Nikolaevna’s brother, had once entered this building. He had carried under his arm a small white bundle put together for him by his wife: a towel, some soap, two changes of underwear, a toothbrush, socks and three handkerchiefs. He had walked through these doors, remembering the five-figure number of his Party card, his writing-desk at the trade delegation in Paris and the first-class coach bound for the Crimea where he had had things out with his wife, drunk a bottle of mineral water and yawned as he flipped through the pages of The Golden Ass.
Mitya certainly hadn’t been guilty of anything. Still, it wasn’t as though Krymov had been put in prison himself.
Abarchuk, Lyudmila Nikolaevna’s first husband, had once walked down the brightly-lit corridor leading from freedom to confinement. He had gone to be interrogated, anxious to clear up an absurd misunderstanding . . . Five months had passed, seven months, eight months – and then he had written: ‘The idea of assassinating comrade Stalin was first suggested to me by a member of the German Military Intelligence Service, a man I was first put in touch with by one of the underg
round leaders . . . The conversation took place after the May Day demonstration, on Yauzsky Boulevard. I promised to give a final answer within five days and we agreed on a further meeting . . .’
The work carried out behind these windows was truly fantastic. During the Civil War, Abarchuk hadn’t so much as flinched when one of Kolchak’s officers had fired at him.
Of course Abarchuk had been coerced into making a false confession. Of course he was a true Communist, a Communist whose strength had been tested under Lenin. Of course he hadn’t been guilty of anything. But still, he had been arrested and he had confessed . . . And Krymov had not been arrested and had not confessed . . .
Krymov had heard one or two things about how these cases were fabricated. He had learned a few things from people who had told him in a whisper: ‘But remember! If you pass this on to anyone – even your wife or your mother – then I’m done for.’
He had learned a little from people who had had too much to drink. Infuriated by someone’s glib stupidity, they had let slip a few careless words and suddenly fallen silent. The following day they had yawned and said in the most casual of tones: ‘By the way, I seem to remember coming out with all kinds of nonsense yesterday. You don’t remember? Well, so much the better.’
He had learned a little from wives of friends who had travelled to camps in order to visit their husbands . . . But all this had been gossip, mere tittle-tattle. Nothing like this had ever happened to Krymov . . .
And now it had. He was in prison. It was absurd, crazy, unbelievable – but it was true.
When Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, officers in the White Guard, priests and kulak agitators had been arrested, he had never, for one moment, wondered what it must be like to be awaiting sentence. Nor had he thought about the families of these men.
Of course he had felt less indifferent when the shells had begun to fall closer, when people like himself – true Soviet citizens and members of the Party – had been arrested. And he had been very shaken when several close friends, people of his own generation whom he looked on as true Leninists, had been arrested. He had been unable to sleep; he had questioned Stalin’s right to deprive people of freedom, to torment them and shoot them. He had thought deeply about the sufferings of these men and their families. After all, they weren’t just kulaks or White officers; they were Old Bolsheviks.