Life and Fate

by Vasily Grossman

  But he had managed to reassure himself. It wasn’t as though he had been imprisoned or exiled. He hadn’t signed anything; he hadn’t pleaded guilty to false charges.

  But now it had happened. He, an Old Bolshevik, was in prison. And he had no explanation for it, no interpretation, no way of reassuring himself.

  He was learning already. The principal focus of a search was a naked man’s teeth, ears, nostrils and groin. A pitiful, ridiculous figure, he would have to hold up his now buttonless trousers and underpants as he walked down the corridor. If he wore spectacles, they would be taken away from him; he would be anxiously screwing up his eyes and rubbing them. He then entered a cell where he was transformed into a laboratory rat. New reflexes were conditioned into him. He spoke only in a whisper. He got up from his bunk, lay down on his bunk, relieved himself, slept and dreamed under incessant observation. It was all monstrously cruel. It was absurd and inhuman. Now he realized what terrible things were done in the Lubyanka. They were tormenting an Old Bolshevik, a Leninist. They were tormenting Comrade Krymov.

  6

  The days passed. Krymov still hadn’t been called for interrogation.

  He already knew what they were fed and when, what time they had their walk, what days they were taken to the bath-house. He knew the times of inspections, the smell of prison tobacco and the titles of the books in the library. He would wait anxiously for his cell-mates to return from interrogations. It was Katsenelenbogen who was called most often. And Bogoleev was always summoned in the afternoon.

  Life without freedom! It was an illness. Losing one’s freedom was like losing one’s health. There was still light, water still flowed from the tap, you still got a bowl of soup – but all these things were different, they were merely something allocated to you. Sometimes, in the interests of the investigation, it was necessary to deprive a prisoner of light, food and sleep. And if you were allowed them, that was also in the interests of the investigation.

  Once, as he returned from an interrogation, the bony old man announced haughtily:

  ‘After three hours of silence, the investigator finally accepted that my surname was Dreling.’

  Bogoleev was very friendly and gentle. He always spoke respectfully to his cell-mates, asking how they were feeling and whether they had slept well. Once he began reading some poems to Krymov, but then broke off and said: ‘I’m sorry. You’re probably not in the least interested.’

  Krymov grinned. ‘To be quite honest, I couldn’t understand a word of it. But I read all of Hegel once – and I could understand that.’

  Bogoleev was very frightened of interrogations. He got quite flustered when the guard came in and asked: ‘Anyone whose name begins with B?’ When he came back, he looked smaller, thinner and older.

  His accounts of his interrogations were always very confused. It was impossible to make out whether he was being charged with an attempt on Stalin’s life or a dislike of socialist-realist literature.

  Once the giant Chekist advised him:

  ‘You should help the man formulate the charge. How about this? “Feeling a wild hatred for everything new, I groundlessly criticized works of art that had been awarded a Stalin Prize.” You’ll get ten years for that. And don’t denounce too many people you know – that doesn’t help at all. On the contrary – you’ll be charged with conspiracy and sent to a strict-regime camp.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Bogoleev. ‘They know everything. How can I help?’

  He often extemporized in whispers on his favourite theme: that they were all of them characters in a fairy-tale . . . ‘Whoever we are – fierce divisional commanders, parachutists, admirers of Matisse and Pissarro, Party members, pilots, designers of vast factories, creators of five-year plans – and however self-assured, however arrogant we may seem, we only have to cross the threshold of an enchanted house, to be touched by a magic wand – and we’re transformed into piglets and squirrels, into little dicky-birds . . . We should be fed on midges and ants’ eggs.’

  Bogoleev’s mind was unusual, clearly capable of profound thoughts, but he was obsessed with petty, everyday matters. He was always worrying that he’d been given less to eat than other people, that what he had been given wasn’t as good, that his walk had been cut short, that someone had eaten his rusks while he was out . . .

  Their life in the cell seemed to be full of events and at the same time an empty sham. They were living in a dried-up river-bed. The investigator studied the pebbles, the clefts, the unevenness of the bank. But the water that had once shaped the bed was no longer there.

  Dreling rarely spoke. If he did, it was usually to Bogoleev – obviously because he wasn’t a member of the Party. But he often got irritated even with him.

  ‘You’re an odd one,’ he said once. ‘First of all, you’re friendly and respectful towards people you despise. Secondly, you ask after my health every day – though it’s a matter of complete indifference to you whether I live or die.’

  Bogoleev looked up at the ceiling and gave a helpless shrug of the shoulders. He then recited in a sing-song voice:

  ‘“What’s your shell made out of, mister tortoise?”

  I said and looked him in the eye.

  “Just from the lessons fear has taught us.”

  Were the words of his reply.’

  ‘Did you make up that doggerel yourself?’ asked Dreling.

  Bogoleev just gave another shrug of the shoulders.

  ‘The man’s afraid. He’s learnt his lessons well,’ said Katsenelenbogen.

  After breakfast Dreling showed Bogoleev the cover of a book.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘To be quite honest – no.’

  ‘I’m no admirer of the work myself,’ said Dreling with a nod of the head. ‘Georgiy Valentinovich Plekhanov once said: “The image of mother created by Gorky is an ikon. The working class doesn’t need ikons.”’

  ‘What’s all this about ikons?’ said Krymov. ‘Generation after generation reads Mother.’

  Sounding like a schoolmistress, Dreling replied:

  ‘You only need ikons if you wish to enslave the working class. In your Communist ikon-case you have ikons of Lenin and ikons of the revered Stalin. Nekrasov didn’t need ikons.’

  Not only his forehead, but his whole skull, his nose, his hands looked as if they had been carved from white bone. Even his words had a bony ring to them.

  Bogoleev suddenly flared up – Krymov had never seen this meek, gentle, depressed man in such a state – and said:

  ‘You’ve still only got as far as Nekrasov in your understanding of poetry. Since then we’ve had Blok. We’ve had Mandelstam. We’ve had Khlebnikov.’

  ‘I’ve never read Mandelstam,’ said Dreling. ‘But as for Khlebnikov – that’s just decadence!’

  ‘To hell with you!’ said Bogoleev, raising his voice for the first time. ‘I’ve had enough of you and your maxims from Plekhanov. Everyone in this cell’s a Marxist of one persuasion or another. What you all have in common is that you’re deaf to poetry. You don’t know a thing about it.’

  It was a strange business. It especially upset Krymov to think that – as far as the sentries and duty officers were concerned – there was no difference between a sick old man like Dreling and a Bolshevik, a commissar, like himself.

  At this moment – though he had always loved Nekrasov and hated the Symbolists and the Decadents – he was ready to side with Bogoleev. And if the bony old man had said a word against Yezhov, he would without hesitation have defended everything – the execution of Bukharin, the banishment of wives who had failed to denounce their husbands, the terrible sentences, the terrible interrogations . . .

  Dreling didn’t say anything. Just then a guard appeared, to take him to the lavatory. Katsenelenbogen turned to Krymov and said:

  ‘For ten whole days there were just the two of us in here. He was as silent as the grave. Once I said: “It’s enough to make a cat laugh – two middle-aged Jews in the Lubyanka whiling
away their evenings without exchanging a single word!” And he didn’t say a word. No, not one word! Why? Why’s he so scornful? Why won’t he speak to me? Is it some way of getting his revenge?’

  ‘He’s an enemy,’ said Krymov.

  Dreling really seemed to have got under the Chekist’s skin. ‘It’s quite unbelievable,’ he went on. ‘It’s certainly not for nothing that he’s inside. He’s got the camp behind him, the grave ahead – and he’s as firm as a rock. I envy him. The guard calls out: “Anyone whose name begins with D?” And what do you think he does? He just sits there, he doesn’t say a word. Now he’s got them to call him by name. And even if they had him shot then and there, he still wouldn’t stand up when the authorities come into the cell.’

  After Dreling had come back, Krymov said to Katsenelenbogen:

  ‘You know, all this will seem insignificant before the judgment of history. Here in prison both you and I continue to hate the enemies of Communism.’

  Dreling glanced at Krymov with amused curiosity.

  ‘The judgment of history!’ he said to no one in particular. ‘You mean its summary proceedings.’

  Katsenelenbogen was wrong to envy Dreling his strength. It was no longer a human strength. What warmed his empty, desolate heart was the chemical warmth of a blind, inhuman fanaticism.

  He seemed uninterested in the war or anything to do with it. He never asked about the situation in Stalingrad or on any of the other fronts. He knew nothing of the new cities and the power of the new heavy industry. He no longer lived a human life; he was merely playing an abstract, never-ending game of prison draughts, a game that concerned no one but himself.

  Krymov was intrigued by Katsenelenbogen. He joked and chattered away, but his eyes – for all their intelligence – were tired and lazy. They were the eyes of someone who knows too much, who is tired of life and unafraid of death.

  Once, when he was talking about the construction of the railway line along the shores of the Arctic, he said:

  ‘A strikingly beautiful project! True, it did cost ten thousand lives.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather terrible?’ said Krymov.

  Katsenelenbogen shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘You should have seen the columns of zeks marching to work. In dead silence. The blue and green of the Northern Lights above them, ice and snow all around them, and the roar of the dark ocean. There’s power for you.’

  Sometimes he gave Krymov advice.

  ‘You should help your interrogator. He’s a recent appointment. It’s hard work for him too. And if you just prompt him a little, you’ll be helping yourself. At least you’ll avoid the “conveyor-belts” – the five-day interrogations. And it will all be the same in the end – the Special Commission will just give you the usual.’

  Krymov tried to argue, but Katsenelenbogen answered:

  ‘The concept of personal innocence is a hangover from the Middle Ages. Pure superstition! Tolstoy declared that no one in the world is guilty. We Chekists have put forward a more advanced thesis: “No one in the world is innocent.” Everyone is subject to our jurisdiction. If a warrant has been issued for your arrest, you are guilty – and a warrant can be issued for everyone. Yes, everyone has the right to a warrant. Even if he has spent his whole life issuing warrants for others. The Moor has ta’en his pay and may depart.’

  He had met a number of Krymov’s friends – several of them when they were being interrogated in 1937. He had a strange way of talking about the people whose cases he had supervised. Without the least hint of emotion he would say: ‘He was a nice guy . . .’; ‘An interesting fellow . . .’; ‘A real eccentric . . .’

  He often alluded to Anatole France and Shevchenko’s ‘Ballad of Opanas’, he loved quoting Babel’s Benya Krik and he referred to the singers and ballerinas of the Bolshoy Theatre by first name and patronymic. He was a collector of rare books; he told Krymov about a precious volume of Radishchev he had acquired not long before he was arrested.

  ‘I’d like my collection to be donated to the Lenin Library,’ he once said. ‘Otherwise it will just be split up by fools who’ve got no idea what it’s worth.’

  He was married to a ballerina, but he seemed less concerned about her than about the fate of his volume of Radishchev. When Krymov said as much, he replied:

  ‘My Angelina’s no fool. She knows how to look after herself.’

  He seemed to understand everything but feel nothing. Simple things like parting, suffering, freedom, love, grief, the fidelity of a woman, were mysteries to him. It was only when he spoke about his early years in the Cheka that you could sense any emotion in his voice. ‘What a time that was! What people!’ He dismissed Krymov’s own beliefs as mere propaganda. He once said about Stalin:

  ‘I admire him even more than I admire Lenin. He’s the one man I truly love.’

  But how could this man – someone who had taken part in the preparations for the trial of the leaders of the Opposition, someone whom Beria had put in charge of a colossal camp construction project inside the Arctic Circle – feel so unperturbed about having to hold up his buttonless trousers as he was taken along at night to be interrogated in his own home? And why, on the other hand, was he so upset by the punishment of silence inflicted on him by the old Menshevik?

  Sometimes Krymov himself began to doubt. Why did he turn hot and cold, why did he break out in sweat as he composed a letter to Stalin? The Moor has ta’en his pay and may depart. All this had happened to tens of thousands of Party members in 1937 – men as good as him or better than him. The Moor has ta’en his pay and may depart. Why was he so appalled now by the word ‘denunciation’? Just because he himself was in prison as a result of a denunciation? He himself had received political reports from his informers in the ranks. The usual thing. The usual denunciations. ‘Soldier Ryaboshtan wears a cross next to the skin and refers to Communists as atheists.’ Did he survive long after being transferred to a penal battalion? ‘Soldier Gordeev doesn’t believe in the strength of the Soviet armed forces and considers Hitler’s final victory to be inevitable.’ Did he survive long in a penal company? ‘Soldier Markeevich said: “The Communists are just thieves. One day we’ll prong the whole lot of them on our bayonets and the people will be free.”’ He had been sent to a firing squad by a military tribunal. And he had denounced people himself. He had denounced Grekov to the Political Administration of the Front. If it hadn’t been for the German bombs, Grekov would have been shot in front of the other officers. What had all these people felt, what had they thought when they had been transferred to penal companies, sentenced by military tribunals, interrogated in Special Departments?

  And how many times before the war had he done exactly the same? How many times had he listened calmly while a friend said: ‘I informed the Party Committee about my conversation with Peter’; ‘Like an honest man he summarized the content of Ivan’s letter to the Party meeting’; ‘He was sent for. As a Communist he had to tell all. He said how the lads felt and he mentioned Volodyas’s letters’?

  Yes, yes, yes.

  And had any of his written or oral explanations ever got anyone out of prison? Their only purpose had been to help him keep his distance, to save him from the quagmire.

  Yes, Krymov had been a poor defender of his friends – even if he had hated these affairs, even if he had been afraid of them, even if he had done all he could not to get entangled in them. What was he getting so worked up about now? What did he want? Did he want the duty-officers in the Lubyanka to know about his loneliness? Did he want his investigators to commiserate with him about being abandoned by the woman he loved? Did he expect them to take into consideration that he called out for her at night, that he had bitten his hand, that his mother had called him Nikolenka?

  Krymov woke up during the night, opened his eyes and saw Dreling standing beside Katsenelenbogen’s bunk. The glaring electric light shone down on the old jailbird’s back. Bogoleev had woken up too; he was sitting on his bunk with a blanket round his le
gs.

  Dreling rushed to the door and banged on it with his bony fists. He shouted in his bony voice:

  ‘Quick! Send us a doctor! One of the prisoners has had a heart attack.’

  ‘Quiet there! Cut it out at once!’ shouted the duty-officer who had come running to the spy-hole.

  ‘What do you mean?’ yelled Krymov. ‘There’s a man dying.’

  He jumped up from his bunk, ran to the door and banged at it with his fists. He noticed that Bogoleev was now lying down again under the blankets, evidently afraid of playing an active role in this sudden emergency.

  Soon the door was flung open and several men came in.

  Katsenelenbogen was unconscious. It took the men a long time to lift his vast body onto the stretcher.

  In the morning Dreling suddenly asked Krymov:

  ‘Tell me, did you, as a Communist commissar, often hear expressions of discontent at the front?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ demanded Krymov. ‘Discontent with what?’

  ‘With the collectivization policy of the Bolsheviks, with the military leadership – any expression of political discontent.’

  ‘Not once. I never came across the least hint of any such attitude.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I see. Just as I thought,’ said Dreling with a satisfied nod of the head.

  7

  Two hammers, one to the north and one to the south, each composed of millions of tons of metal and flesh, awaited the signal to advance.

  It was the forces to the north-west of Stalingrad that launched the attack. On 19 November, 1942, at 7.30 a.m., a massive artillery bombardment began along the entire length of the South-Western and Don Fronts; it lasted for eighty minutes. A wall of fire came down over the positions held by the 3rd Rumanian Army.