62
It had been a difficult day on the barge. The clouds lay heavily on the Volga. There were no children playing outside, no women washing clothes in the holes in the ice; the icy Astrakhan wind tore at the frozen rags and bits of rubbish, forcing its way through crevices in the walls of the barge, whistling and howling through the hold.
Everyone sat there without moving, numb, wrapped up in shawls and blankets. Even the most talkative of the women had fallen silent, listening to the howl of the wind and the creaking boards. When night came, it was as though the darkness had sprung from the unbearable sadness, from the terrible cold and hunger, from the filth, from the endless torments of the war.
Vera lay with a blanket up to her chin. On her cheeks she could feel the draught that whistled into the hold with each gust of wind. Everything seemed hopeless: her father would never be able to get her out of here; the war would never come to an end; next spring the Germans would spread right over the Urals and into Siberia; there would always be the whine of planes in the sky and the thunder of bombs on the earth.
She began to doubt, for the first time, whether Viktorov really was nearby. After all, there were airfields in every sector of the front. And he might no longer even be at the front – or even in the rear.
She moved the sheet aside and looked at her baby’s face. Why was he crying? She must be passing her sadness to him, just as she passed on her milk and her warmth.
That day everyone felt crushed by the mercilessness of the cold and wind, by the vastness of the war that had stretched out over the Russian steppes.
How long can one bear a life of continual cold and hunger?
Old Sergeyevna, the midwife, came over to Vera.
‘I don’t like the look of you today. You looked better on the first day.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Vera. ‘Papa will be back tomorrow. He’ll bring some food with him.’
Even though Sergeyevna wanted the nursing mother to have some fats and sugar, she replied sourly:
‘Yes, it’s all right for you lot, you leaders and directors. You always get enough to eat. All we ever get is half-frozen potatoes.’
‘Quiet there!’ someone shouted. ‘Quiet!’
All they could hear was an indistinct voice at the other end of the hold. Then the voice rang out loud and clear, drowning every other sound. Someone was reading a news bulletin by the light of the oil-lamp.
‘ . . . A successful offensive in the Stalingrad area . . . Several days ago our forces on the outskirts of Stalingrad launched an offensive against the German Fascists . . . Our forces are advancing along two axes – to the north-west and to the south of Stalingrad . . .’
Everyone stood there and cried. A miraculous link joined them both to the men marching through the snow, shielding their faces from the wind, and to the men who now lay on the snow, spattered with blood, their eyes growing dim as their lives ran out.
Everyone was crying: workers, old men, women, even the children – whose faces had become suddenly adult and attentive.
‘Our forces have taken the town of Kalach on the east bank of the Don, Krivomuzginskaya railway station, the town and station of Abgasarovo . . .’
Vera was crying with everyone else. She too could feel the link between the exhausted listeners in the barge and the men marching through the darkness of the winter night, falling and standing up again, falling and never standing up again.
It was for her and her son, for these women with chapped hands, for these old men, for these children wrapped in their mothers’ torn shawls, that the men were going to their death.
She thought with ecstasy how her husband might suddenly come in. Everyone would gather round him and call him ‘My son!’
The man came to the end of the bulletin. ‘The offensive launched by our troops is still continuing.’
63
The duty-officer had just given a report to the general in command of the 8th Air Army on the sorties made by their fighter squadrons during the day.
The general looked through the papers spread out in front of him.
‘Zakabluka’s having a hard time. Yesterday he lost his commissar and today he’s lost two pilots.’
‘I’ve just phoned his HQ, comrade General,’ said the duty-officer. ‘Comrade Berman’s going to be buried tomorrow. The Member of the Military Soviet has promised to fly in and give a speech.’
‘He does like giving speeches,’ said the general with a smile.
‘As for the pilots, comrade General, Lieutenant Korol was shot down over the area held by the 38th division. And Senior Lieutenant Viktorov was set on fire over a German airfield. He couldn’t get back to our lines – he came down on a hill in no man’s land. The infantry tried to get him out, but the Germans stopped them.’
‘Yes, yes . . .,’ said the general, scratching his nose with a pencil. ‘I know what: you phone Front Headquarters and remind them that Zakharov promised us a new jeep. Soon we won’t be able to get about at all.’
The dead pilot lay there all night on a hill covered with snow; it was a cold night and the stars were quite brilliant. At dawn the hill turned pink – the pilot now lay on a pink hill. Then the wind got up and the snow covered his body.
PART THREE
1
A few days before the beginning of the Stalingrad offensive Krymov arrived at the underground command-post of the 64th Army. Abramov’s aide was eating a pie and some chicken soup.
He put down his spoon; you could tell from his sigh that it was good soup. Krymov’s eyes went moist; he desperately wanted a bite of cabbage-pie.
Behind the partition, the aide announced his arrival. After a moment’s silence Krymov heard a familiar voice; it was too quiet for him to make out the words.
The aide came out and announced:
‘The member of the Military Soviet is unable to receive you.’
Krymov was taken aback.
‘But I never asked to see him. Comrade Abramov summoned me himself.’
The aide just looked at his soup.
‘So it’s been cancelled, has it? I can’t make head or tail of all this,’ said Krymov.
He went back up to the surface and plodded along the gully towards the bank of the Volga. He had to call at the editorial office of the Army newspaper.
He felt annoyed by the senseless summons and by his sudden greed for someone else’s pie. At the same time he listened attentively to the intermittent gunfire coming from the Kuporosnaya ravine.
A girl walked past on her way to the Operations Section. She was wearing a forage cap and a greatcoat. Krymov looked her up and down and said to himself: ‘She’s not bad at all.’
The memory of Yevgenia came back to him, and as always his heart sank. As always he immediately reproved himself: ‘Forget her! Forget her!’ He tried to call to mind a young Cossack girl he had spent the night with in a village they had passed through. Then he thought of Spiridonov: ‘He’s a fine fellow – even if he isn’t a Spinoza!’
For a long time afterwards Krymov was to remember these thoughts with piercing clarity – together with the gunfire, the autumn sky and his irritation with Abramov.
A staff officer with a captain’s green stripes on his greatcoat called out his name. He had followed him from the command-post.
Krymov gave him a puzzled look.
‘This way please,’ the captain said quietly, pointing towards the door of a hut.
Krymov walked past the sentry and through the doorway. They entered a room with a large desk and a portrait of Stalin on the plank wall.
Krymov expected the captain to say something like this: ‘Excuse me, comrade Battalion Commissar, but would you mind taking this report to comrade Toshcheev on the left bank?’ Instead, he said:
‘Hand over your weapon and your personal documents.’
Krymov’s reply was confused and meaningless.
‘But what right . . . ? Show me your own documents first . . .!’
There coul
d be no doubt about what had happened – absurd and senseless though it might be. Krymov came out with the words that had been muttered before by many thousands of people in similar circumstances:
‘It’s crazy. I don’t understand. It must be a misunderstanding.’
These words were no longer those of a free man.
2
‘You’re playing the fool. I want to know who recruited you when your unit was surrounded.’
He was now on the left bank, being interrogated in the Special Section at Front HQ.
The painted floor, the pots of flowers by the window, the pendulum-clock on the wall, all seemed calm and provincial. The rattling of the window-panes and the rumble of bombs from Stalingrad seemed pleasantly humdrum.
How little this lieutenant-colonel behind the wooden kitchen-table corresponded to the pale-lipped interrogator of his imagination.
But the lieutenant-colonel, one of his shoulders smudged with whitewash from the stove, walked up to the man sitting on the wooden stool – an expert on the workers’ movement in the colonies of the Far East, a man with a commissar’s star on the sleeves of his uniform, a man who had been brought up by a sweet, good-natured mother – and punched him in the face.
Krymov ran his hand over his lips and nose, looked at his palm and saw a mixture of blood and spittle. He tried to move his jaw. His lips had gone numb and his tongue was like stone. He looked at the painted floor – yes, it had just been washed – and swallowed his blood.
Only during the night did he begin to feel hatred for his interrogator. At first he had felt neither hatred nor physical pain. The blow on the face was the outward sign of a moral catastrophe. He could respond only with dumbfounded amazement.
The lieutenant-colonel looked at the clock. It was time for lunch in the canteen for heads-of-departments.
Krymov was taken across the dirty, frozen snow that covered the yard towards a rough log building that served as a lock-up. The sound of the bombs falling on Stalingrad was very clear.
His first thought as he came to his senses was that the lock-up might be destroyed by a German bomb . . . He felt disgusted with himself.
In the stifling, log-walled cell he was overwhelmed by despair and fury: he was losing himself. He was the man who had shouted hoarsely as he ran to the aeroplane to meet his friend Georgiy Dimitrov, he was the man who had borne Clara Zetkin’s coffin – and just now he had given a furtive glance to see whether or not a security officer would hit him a second time. He had led his men out of encirclement; they had called him ‘Comrade Commissar’. And now a peasant with a tommy-gun had looked at him – a Communist being beaten up and interrogated by another Communist – with squeamish contempt.
He had not yet taken in the full meaning of the words ‘loss of freedom’ . . . He had become another being. Everything in him had to change. He had lost his freedom . . .
He felt giddy . . . He would appeal to Shcherbakov, to the Central Committee! He would appeal to Molotov! He wouldn’t rest until that scoundrel of a lieutenant-colonel had been shot. ‘Yes – pick up that phone! Ring up Krasin! Stalin has heard my name. He knows who I am. Comrade Stalin once asked comrade Zhdanov: “Is that the same Krymov who used to work in the Comintern?”’
Then Krymov felt the quagmire beneath his feet: a dark, gluey, bottomless swamp was sucking him in. He had come up against something insuperable, something more powerful than the German Panzer divisions. He had lost his freedom.
Zhenya! Zhenya! Can you see me? Zhenya! Look at me – I’m in trouble, terrible trouble! I’m alone and abandoned. You too have abandoned me.
A degenerate had been beating him. His head span; his fingers were almost in spasm: he wanted to throw himself at the security officer.
Never had he felt such hatred towards the Tsarist police, the Mensheviks or even towards the SS officer he had once interrogated.
No, the man now trampling over him was not someone alien. Krymov could see himself in this officer, could recognize in him the same Krymov who as a boy had wept with happiness over those astonishing words of the Communist Manifesto: ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ And this feeling of recognition was appalling.
3
Darkness fell. Intermittently, the rumble of Stalingrad boomed through the close, evil air of the prison. Perhaps the Germans were going for Batyuk and Rodimtsev.
From time to time there were movements out in the corridor. The doors of the general cell – for deserters, traitors to the Motherland, looters and rapists – opened and closed. When the prisoners asked to go to the lavatory, the sentry would argue for a long time before opening the door.
Krymov himself had been put in the general cell after being brought over from Stalingrad. No one had paid any attention to the commissar with the red star still sewn on his sleeve: all the men cared about was whether he had any paper for rolling their dusty tobacco. All they wanted was to be able to eat, smoke and carry out their natural functions.
Who had denounced him? What a torment it was: to know that he was innocent and yet to suffer from this chilling sense of irreparable guilt. Rodimtsev’s conduit, the ruins of house 6/1, the White-Russian bogs, the Voronezh winter, the rivers they’d had to ford – everything light and joyful was lost for ever.
How he wanted simply to go out onto the street, stroll around, crane his neck and look up at the sky . . . And then buy a newspaper, have a shave, write a letter to his brother. He wanted a cup of tea. He had to return a book he’d borrowed for the evening. He wanted to look at his watch, go to the bath-house, take a handkerchief out of his suitcase. But he couldn’t do anything. He had lost his freedom.
Then he had been taken out into the corridor. The commandant had shouted at the guard:
‘I told you in plain Russian! Why the hell did you go and put him in the general cell? And don’t just stand there gaping! Do you want to be sent to the front line?’
When the commandant had gone, the guard had complained:
‘It’s always the same. The solitary cell’s occupied. He told us to keep it for people sentenced to death. If I put you there, what can I do with the fellow who’s already there?’
Soon Krymov saw the firing-squad taking the man out to be executed. His fair hair clung to the narrow, scrawny nape of his neck. He could have been anything from twenty years old to thirty-five.
Krymov was then transferred to the solitary cell. In the semi-darkness he made out a pot on the table. Next to it he could feel a hare moulded from the soft inside of a loaf of bread. The condemned man must have just put it down – it was still soft. Only the hare’s ears had had time to grow stale.
Krymov, his mouth hanging open, sat down on the plank-bed. He had too much on his mind to be able to sleep. Nor could he think. His temples were throbbing. He felt deafened. Everything was whirling around in his head. There was nothing he could catch hold of, no firm point from which to begin a line of thought.
During the night there was a commotion in the corridor. The guards called the corporal. There was a tramping of boots. The commandant – Krymov recognized his voice – said: ‘To hell with that battalion commissar. Put him in the guard-room.’ Then he added: ‘What a story! I bet it’ll get to the CO.’
The door of his cell opened and a soldier shouted: ‘Out!’
Krymov went out. In the corridor stood a bare-footed man in his underwear.
Krymov had seen many terrible things in his life, but nothing so terrible as this small, dirty yellow face. Its lips, wrinkles, and trembling cheeks were all crying; everything was crying except for the eyes; and so terrible was the expression in those eyes, it would have been better never even to have glimpsed them.
‘Come on, come on!’ said the guard.
When Krymov was in the guard-room, he learned what had happened.
‘They keep threatening to send me to the front, but this place is a thousand times worse. Your nerves get worn to a frazzle . . . A soldier’s to be executed for self-mutilation – he’d shot himself in t
he left hand through a loaf of bread. They shoot him, cover him over with earth – and during the night he comes to life again and finds his way back!’
The guard avoided addressing Krymov directly – so as not to have to choose between the polite and impolite forms of the second person.
‘They make a hash of everything they set their hands to. It wears your nerves to a frazzle. Even a pig gets slaughtered better than that! What a mess! The ground’s frozen – so they rake up some weeds, sprinkle them over him and off they go. And then he gets up. What do you expect? He couldn’t have done that if he’d been buried according to the rule-book.’
Krymov – who had always answered questions, given explanations, set people back on the true path – was bewildered.
‘But why did he come back here?’
The guard laughed.
‘And now the sergeant-major wants him to be given some bread and tea while they sort out his papers. The head of the catering section’s raising hell. How can they give him tea when they’ve already written him off? And why should the sergeant-major be allowed to bungle everything and then expect the catering department to bail him out?’
‘What did you do before the war?’ Krymov asked suddenly.
‘I was a beekeeper on a State farm.’
‘I see,’ said Krymov. At that moment everything – both inside him and outside him – was equally incomprehensible.
At dawn Krymov was taken back to the solitary cell. The hare was still standing beside the pot; its skin was now hard and rough. Krymov could hear a wheedling voice in the general cell:
‘Come on, comrade guard! Take me along for a piss.’
A reddish-brown sun was rising over the steppe. It was like a frozen beetroot with lumps of earth still clinging to it.
Soon afterwards Krymov was taken out and put in the back of a truck. A young lieutenant sat down beside him, the sergeant-major handed over his suitcase and the truck set off for the airfield, grinding and jolting over the frozen mud.
Life and Fate Page 74