The investigator came back.
‘Did you sleep?’ asked the captain.
‘Your superior officer doesn’t sleep,’ replied the investigator in a schoolmasterly tone of voice. ‘He takes a rest.’ This was a very old chestnut.
‘Of course,’ agreed the captain.
The investigator was just like a worker coming on shift who looks over his bench and exchanges a few businesslike words with the man he is relieving; he glanced first at Krymov, then at his writing-desk, and said: ‘Very well, comrade Captain.’
He looked at his watch, took the file out of his drawer, and said, in a voice full of animation: ‘Now then, Krymov, let’s continue.’
They got down to work.
Today, it was the war that most concerned the investigator. Once again he turned out to have a vast fund of knowledge: he knew about Krymov’s different postings; he knew the numbers of the regiments and armies concerned; he mentioned the names of people who had fought beside him; he quoted remarks Krymov had made at the Political Section, together with his comments on an illiterate memorandum of the general’s.
All Krymov’s work at the front, the speeches he had made under fire, the faith he had been able to impart to his soldiers through the constant hardships of the retreat – all this had suddenly ceased to exist.
He was a miserable chatterbox who had demoralized his comrades, destroying their faith and infecting them with a feeling of hopelessness. How could it be doubted that German Intelligence had helped him to cross the lines in order to continue his work as a saboteur and spy?
During the first few minutes of the new session the investigator’s lively enthusiasm communicated itself to Krymov too.
‘Say what you like,’ he said, ‘but I’ll never admit to being a spy.’
The investigator glanced out through the window. It was getting dark; he could no longer clearly make out the papers on his desk.
He turned on his desk-lamp and let down the blue black-out blind.
From outside the door came a sullen, animal-like howl. It broke off as suddenly as it had begun.
‘Now then, Krymov,’ he said as he sat down again at his desk.
He asked Krymov if he knew why he had never been promoted. Krymov’s answer was somewhat confused.
‘You just stayed on as a battalion commissar, when you should have been the Member of the Military Soviet for an Army or even a Front.’
For a moment he just stared at Krymov in silence. It was perhaps the first time he had really gazed at him as an investigator should. Then, very solemnly, he announced: ‘Trotsky himself said, “That’s pure marble!” about one of your works. If that reptile had seized power, you’d be doing well for yourself. “Pure marble” indeed!’
‘Now he’s playing trumps,’ thought Krymov. ‘The ace itself!’
All right then, he’d describe the whole incident – when and where it had taken place – but one could just as well put the same questions to comrade Stalin himself: Krymov had never had the least connection with Trotskyism; he had always, without exception, voted against any Trotskyist resolutions.
All he really wanted was to take off his boots, lie down, put up his bare feet, and scratch himself in his sleep.
Quietly, almost affectionately, the investigator said:
‘Why won’t you help us? Do you really think it’s just a matter of whether or not you committed crimes before the war, whether or not you renewed contacts and agreed on rendezvous during the time you were surrounded? It’s something more serious and deep-rooted than that. It’s a matter of the new direction of the Party. You must help the Party in this new stage of its struggle. To do that, you must first renounce your past opinions. Only a Bolshevik is capable of such a task. That’s why I’m talking to you now.’
‘Very well,’ Krymov said slowly and sleepily. ‘I can allow that, in spite of myself, I may have given expression to views hostile to the Party. My own internationalism may have contradicted the policies of a sovereign Socialist State. I may have been out of touch with the way things were going after 1937, out of touch with the new people. Yes, I can admit all this. But espionage, sabotage . . .’
‘Why that “but”? Can’t you see that you’re already on the way towards realizing your hostility to the cause of the Party? What does the mere form matter? Why that “but”, when you’ve already admitted what’s most important?’
‘No, I deny that I’m a spy.’
‘So you don’t want to help the Party? Just when we get to the point, you try and hide. It’s like that, is it? You’re shit, real dogshit!’
Krymov jumped up, grabbed the investigator’s tie, and banged his fist on the table. Something inside the telephone clicked and tinkled.
‘You son of a bitch, you swine,’ he cried out in a piercing howl, ‘where were you when I led people into battle in the Ukraine and the Bryansk forests? Where were you during the winter I was fighting outside Voronezh? Were you ever in Stalingrad, you bastard? Who are you to say I never did anything for the Party? I suppose you were defending our Motherland here in the Lubyanka, you . . . you Tsarist gendarme! And you don’t believe I fought for Socialism in Stalingrad! Were you ever nearly executed in Shanghai? Were you shot in the left shoulder by one of Kolchak’s soldiers in 1917?’
After that he was beaten up. He wasn’t just beaten up any old how; he wasn’t just punched in the face like in the Special Section at the front; he was beaten up carefully, intelligently, by two young men in new uniforms who had an understanding of anatomy and physiology. As they beat him up, he shouted:
‘You swine, you should be sent to a penal detachment . . . You should be sent to face a tank-attack with nothing but rifles . . . Deserters . . .’
They carried on with their work, quite without anger and leaving nothing to chance. They didn’t seem to be hitting him at all hard, to be putting any force behind their punches; nevertheless, there was something terrible about each blow, just as there is in a wounding remark delivered with icy calm.
They hadn’t once hit Krymov in the teeth, but blood was pouring out of his mouth. The blood hadn’t come from his nose or his jaw; it wasn’t that he had bitten his tongue like in Akhtuba . . . This was blood from deep inside him, blood from his lungs. He could no longer remember where he was or what was happening to him . . . Then he caught sight of the investigator’s face looming over him; he was pointing at the portrait of Gorky above the desk and asking: ‘What was it the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky once said?’
He answered his question himself, sounding like a schoolmaster again: ‘If an enemy won’t yield, he must be destroyed.’
After that Krymov saw a light on the ceiling and a man with narrow epaulettes.
‘Very well,’ said the investigator. ‘You don’t need any more rest, thanks to medical science.’
Soon Krymov was back at the desk, listening to the investigator’s wise exhortations.
‘We can sit like this for a week, a month, a whole year . . . Let me put things very simply for you. You may not be guilty but you can still sign what I tell you to. Then you won’t be beaten up any more. Is that clear? You may be sentenced by the Special Commission but you won’t be beaten up again – and that’s quite something! Do you think I enjoy seeing you being beaten up? And we’ll let you sleep. Do you understand?’
Time passed; the interrogation dragged on. It seemed as though nothing would be able to shock Krymov out of his stupor now. Nevertheless, the investigator did once make him jerk back his head and gape at him in astonishment.
‘These are all things that happened a long time ago,’ said the investigator, pointing at Krymov’s file. ‘We can forget about them. But what we cannot forget is your base treachery towards the Motherland during the battle for Stalingrad. Our witnesses and documents all say the same thing. You tried to weaken the political consciousness of the soldiers in the surrounded house 6/1. You incited Grekov, a true patriot, to treachery: you tried to make him go over to the enemy. You
betrayed the trust shown in you both by the Party and by your commanding officers when they chose to send you to this house as a military commissar. How did you behave when you got there? Like an enemy agent!’
Krymov was beaten up again in the small hours. He seemed to be drowning in warm black milk. Once again the man with the narrow epaulettes nodded as he wiped the needle of his syringe. Once again the investigator said: ‘Well then, thanks to medical science . . .’
They were sitting opposite one another again. Krymov looked at the investigator’s tired face and felt surprised at his own lack of anger. Could he really have seized this same man by the tie and tried to strangle him? Now he was beginning to feel quite close to his investigator again. The desk no longer separated them from one another: they were two comrades, two disappointed men.
Suddenly Krymov remembered how the man in bloodstained underwear who hadn’t been shot properly had come back from the steppe at night, back to the Front Special Section.
‘That’s my fate too,’ he thought. ‘I’ve got nowhere to go. It’s too late.’
Later he asked to go to the lavatory. The captain from the previous day appeared again. He raised the blind, turned out the light and lit a cigarette.
Once again Krymov saw the light of day, a sullen light that seemed to come not from the sun, or even the sky, but from the grey brick of the Inner Prison.
43
The other bunks were all empty: his neighbours must have been transferred to another cell, or else they were being interrogated.
He lay there, frayed. He was quite lost; his whole life had been smeared with filth. He had a terrible pain in the small of his back; they must have injured his kidneys.
At this bitter moment, his whole life shattered, he understood the power of a woman’s love. A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more they lacerated his soul, the more revolting and contemptible he became to the world, the more she would love him. She would run after a truck; she would wait in the queues on Kuznetsky Most, or even by the camp boundary-fence, desperate to hand over a few sweets or an onion; she would bake shortbread for him on an oil-stove; she would give whole years of her life just to be able to see him for half an hour . . .
Not every woman you sleep with can be called a wife.
The despair that cut into him like a knife made him want to reduce someone else to despair.
He composed several lines of a letter to her: ‘Doubtless you were glad to hear what has happened, not because I have been crushed, but because you managed to run away from me in time; you must be blessing your rat’s instinct that made you desert a sinking ship . . . I am alone . . .’
He glimpsed the telephone on the investigator’s desk . . . a great lout was punching him in the side, under his ribs . . . the captain was raising the blind, turning out the light . . . he could hear the rustling of the pages of his file . . .
He was just falling asleep with that sound in his ears when someone drove a crooked, red-hot cobbler’s awl into his skull. His brain seemed to smell of burning. Yevgenia Nikolaevna had denounced him!
‘Marble! Pure marble!’ The words spoken to him one morning in the Znamenka, in the office of the chairman of the Revolutionary War Soviet of the Republic . . . The man with the pointed beard and sparkling pince-nez had read through Krymov’s article and talked to him in a quiet, friendly voice. He remembered it all: that night he had told Zhenya how the Central Committee had recalled him from the Comintern in order to edit booklets for Politizdat. ‘Once he was a human being,’ he had said of Trotsky as he described how the latter had read his article ‘Revolution and Reform – China and India’, how he had said, ‘That’s pure marble.’
These words had been spoken tête-à-tête and he had never repeated them to anyone except Zhenya. The investigator must have heard them from her lips. She had denounced him.
He no longer even felt his seventy hours without sleep; he was already quite recovered. Perhaps she had been coerced? What if she had? Comrades, Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy, I am dead! I’ve been killed. Not by a bullet from a pistol, not by someone’s fist, not even by being deprived of sleep. Zhenya has killed me. I’ll testify and confess to anything. But on one condition: you must confirm that it was she who denounced me.
He got out of bed and started to bang on the door with his fist. The sentry immediately looked in through the spy-hole and Krymov shouted: ‘Take me to the investigator! I’ll sign everything!’
The duty-officer appeared and said: ‘Stop that noise. You can give your testimony when you’re called.’
He couldn’t just stay here alone. It was easier to be beaten up and lose consciousness. That was much better. Thanks to medical science . . .
He hobbled to his bed. Just as it seemed he was unable to endure another moment of this torment, just as his brain seemed on the point of bursting open and sending out thousands of splinters into his heart, throat and eyes, he understood: it was quite impossible that Zhenechka had denounced him. He coughed and began to shake.
‘Forgive me, forgive me. I wasn’t destined to be happy with you. That’s my fault, not yours.’
He was gripped by a wonderful feeling, the kind of feeling that had probably never been experienced by anyone in this building since Dzerzhinsky had first set foot in it.
He woke up. Opposite him sat the vast bulk of Katsenelenbogen, crowned by his mop of dishevelled curls.
Krymov smiled and a frown appeared on his neighbour’s low, fleshy forehead. Krymov understood that Katsenelenbogen had seen his smile as a symptom of madness.
‘I see they gave you a hard time,’ said Katsenelenbogen, pointing at Krymov’s bloodstained shirt.
‘They did.’ Krymov grimaced. ‘What about you?’
‘I was having a rest in hospital. Our neighbours have left. The Special Commission has given Dreling another ten years, which makes thirty in all. And Bogoleev’s been transferred to another cell.’
‘I . . .’
‘Go on, say what you want to say.’
‘I think that under Communism the MGB will secretly gather together everything good about people, every kind word they ever say. Their agents will listen in on telephone cells, read through letters, get people to speak their minds – but only in order to elicit everything to do with faithfulness, honesty and kindness. All this will be reported to the Lubyanka and gathered into a dossier. But only good things! This will be a place where faith in humanity is strengthened, not where it is destroyed. I’ve already laid the first stone . . . I believe. Yes, I have conquered in spite of every denunciation and lie; I believe, I believe . . .’
Katsenelenbogen listened to him absent-mindedly.
‘That’s all very true. That’s how it will be. All you need add is that once this radiant dossier has been gathered together, you’ll be brought here, to the big house, and beaten up the same as always.’
He looked searchingly at Krymov. He couldn’t understand how a man with Krymov’s yellow, sallow face, a man with hollow sunken eyes and clots of black blood on his chin, could possibly be smiling so calmly and happily.
44
Paulus’s adjutant, Colonel Adam, was standing in front of an open suitcase. His batman, Ritter, was squatting on the floor and sorting through piles of underwear that had been spread out on newspapers. They had spent the night burning papers in the field-marshal’s office. They had even burnt Paulus’s own large map, something Adam looked on as a sacred relic of the war.
Paulus hadn’t slept at all that night. He had refused his morning coffee and had watched Adam’s comings and goings with complete indifference. From time to time he got up and walked about the room, picking his way through the files of papers awaiting cremation. The canvas-backed maps proved hard to burn; they choked up the grate and had to be cleared out with a poker.
Each time Ritter opened the do
or of the stove, Paulus stretched out his hands to the fire. Adam had thrown a greatcoat over Paulus’s shoulders, but he had shaken it off irritably. Adam had had to hang it up again on the peg.
Did Paulus imagine he was already in Siberia, warming his hands at the fire together with all the other soldiers, wilderness ahead of him, wilderness behind?
‘I ordered Ritter to put plenty of warm underclothes in your suitcase,’ said Adam. ‘When we were children and we tried to imagine the Last Judgment, we were wrong. It’s got nothing to do with fire and blazing coals.’
General Schmidt had called round twice during the night. The cables had all been cut and the telephones had fallen silent.
From the moment they had first been encircled, Paulus had seen very clearly that his forces would be unable to fight. All the conditions – tactical, psychological, meteorological and technical – that had determined his success during the summer were now absent; the pluses had turned into minuses. He had reported to Hitler that, in his opinion, the 6th Army should break through the encircling forces to the South-West, in liaison with Manstein, and form a corridor for the evacuation of the troops; they would have to reconcile themselves to the loss of a large part of their heavy armaments.
On 24 December Yeremenko had defeated Manstein’s forces near the Myshovka River; from that moment it had been obvious to anyone that further resistance in Stalingrad was impossible. Only one man had disputed this. He had begun referring to the 6th Army as the advance post of a front that stretched from the White Sea to the Terek; he had renamed it ‘Fortress Stalingrad’. Meanwhile the staff at Army Headquarters had begun referring to it as a camp for armed prisoners-of-war.
Paulus had sent another coded message to the effect that there was still some possibility of a break-out. He had expected a terrible outburst of fury: no one had ever dared contradict the Supreme Commander twice. He had heard the story of how Hitler, in a rage, had once torn the Knight’s Cross from Field-Marshal Rundstedt’s chest; Brauchitsch, who witnessed this scene, had apparently had a heart attack. The Führer was not someone to trifle with.