Life and Fate

by Vasily Grossman

  No, what Viktor felt was a sense of pride – pride that he had been victorious over his persecutors. Not long ago he had felt quite free of resentment. Even now, he had no desire to occasion these people harm, to get his revenge. But he did take great joy in remembering their acts of dishonesty, cowardice and cruelty. The worse someone had behaved, the sweeter it was to think of him now.

  When Nadya arrived back from school, Lyudmila shouted out:

  ‘Nadya, Stalin’s just telephoned Papa!’

  Nadya rushed into the room, her scarf trailing on the floor, her coat half on and half off. Seeing her reaction made it easier for Viktor to imagine everyone’s consternation when, later today or tomorrow, they heard what had happened.

  They sat down to lunch. Viktor suddenly pushed his spoon away and said: ‘I really don’t want anything to eat.’

  ‘It’s a complete rout for all your detractors and persecutors,’ said Lyudmila. ‘Just think what must be going on now in the Institute and the Academy!’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And the other women in the special store will say hello to you again, Mama, and smile at you,’ said Nadya.

  ‘That’s right,’ replied Lyudmila with a little laugh.

  Viktor had always detested bootlickers. Still, it pleased him to think how obsequiously Shishakov would smile at him now.

  There was just one thing he didn’t understand. Mixed with his joy and his feeling of triumph was a sadness that seemed to well up from somewhere deep underground, a sense of regret for something sacred and cherished that seemed to be slipping away from him. For some reason he felt guilty, but he had no idea what of or before whom.

  He sat there, eating his favourite buckwheat-and-potato soup and remembering a spring night in Kiev when he was a child; he had watched the stars looking down at him between the chestnut blossoms and wept. The world had seemed splendid then, the future quite vast, full of goodness and radiant light. Today his fate had been decided. It was as though he were saying goodbye to that pure, childish, almost religious love of science and its magic, saying goodbye to what he had felt a few weeks before as he overcame his terror and refused to lie to himself.

  There was only one person he could have talked to about all this; but she wasn’t there.

  There was one other strange thing. He felt impatient and greedy; he wanted the whole world to know what had happened. He wanted it to be known in the Institute, in the auditoriums of the University, in the Central Committee, in the Academy, in the house management office, in the dacha office, in the different scientific societies. But Viktor felt quite indifferent as to whether or not Sokolov knew. And deep down, quite unconsciously, he would have preferred Marya Ivanovna not to know. He had the feeling it was better for their love that he should be persecuted and unhappy.

  He told Nadya and Lyudmila a story they had all known even before the war. One night Stalin appeared in the metro, slightly drunk, sat down beside a young woman, and asked: ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’d love to look round the Kremlin,’ the woman replied.

  Stalin thought for a moment and said: ‘Yes, I can certainly arrange that for you.’

  ‘See!’ exclaimed Nadya. ‘You’re such a great man now that Mama let you finish the story without interrupting. She’s already heard it a hundred and ten times.’

  Once again, for the hundred and eleventh time, they all laughed at the simple-minded woman in the metro.

  ‘Vitya,’ said Lyudmila. ‘Maybe we should have something to drink to celebrate the occasion?’ She went to fetch a box of sweets that had been set aside for Nadya’s birthday. ‘There,’ she said. ‘But calm down, Nadya. There’s no need to throw yourself on them like a starving wolf!’

  ‘Papa,’ said Nadya, ‘what right have we got to laugh at the woman in the metro? After all, you could have asked Stalin about Krymov and Uncle Dmitry.’

  ‘What do you mean? How could I?’

  ‘I think you could. Grandmother would have said something straight away. That’s for sure.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Viktor. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Lyudmila.

  ‘We’re not being silly,’ said Nadya. ‘We’re talking about the life of your own brother.’

  ‘Vitya,’ said Lyudmila. ‘You must phone Shishakov.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve quite taken in what’s happened,’ said Viktor. ‘There’s no need for me to phone anyone.’

  ‘You should phone Shishakov,’ said Lyudmila obstinately.

  ‘Me phone Shishakov? When Stalin’s wished me success in my work?’

  Something had changed in Viktor. Until now he had always felt indignant at the way Stalin was idolized, the way his name appeared again and again in every column of every newspaper. And then there were all the portraits, busts, statues, oratorios, poems, hymns . . . And the way he was called a genius, the father of the people . . .

  What had made Viktor particularly indignant was the way even Lenin’s name had been eclipsed; Stalin’s military genius was often contrasted with Lenin’s more civic genius. There was a play of Aleksey Tolstoy’s where Lenin obligingly lit a match so Stalin could have a puff at his pipe. One artist had portrayed Stalin striding up the steps of the Smolny with Lenin darting along behind him like a bantam cock. And if Lenin and Stalin were portrayed together in public, then the children and old people would be gazing tenderly at Lenin while a procession of armed giants – workers and sailors festooned with machine-gun belts – marched towards Stalin. Historians describing critical moments in the life of the Soviet State made it seem as though Lenin were constantly asking Stalin for advice – during the Kronstadt rebellion, during the defence of Tsaritsyn, even during the invasion of Poland. The strike at Baku, which Stalin had participated in, and the newspaper Bdzola, which he had edited, seemed more important in the history of the Party than the whole of the revolutionary movement that had gone before.

  ‘Bdzola, Bdzola,’ Viktor had repeated angrily. ‘What about Zhelayabov, Plekhanov and Kropotkin? What about the Decembrists? All we ever hear about now is Bdzola.’

  For a thousand years Russia had been governed by an absolute autocracy, by Tsars and their favourites. But never had anyone held such power as Stalin.

  Now, though, Viktor no longer felt angry or horrified. The greater Stalin’s power, the more deafening the hymns and trumpets, the thicker the clouds of incense at the feet of the living idol, the happier Viktor felt.

  It was getting dark and Viktor didn’t feel afraid.

  Stalin had spoken to him. Stalin had said: ‘I wish you success in your work.’

  When it was fully dark, Viktor went out for a walk. He no longer felt helpless and doomed. No, he felt calm. The people who counted already knew everything. He found it strange even to think about Krymov, Abarchuk and Dmitry, about Madyarov and Chetverikov. Their fate was not his fate. He felt sad for them, but he felt no empathy.

  Viktor was happy in his triumph: his intelligence, his moral strength had brought him victory. It didn’t matter that this happiness was so different from what he had felt when he had been on trial, when he had felt his mother standing there beside him. He no longer cared whether Madyarov had been arrested or whether Krymov had informed on him. For the first time in his life he was free of anxiety about his careless talk and seditious jokes.

  Late at night, when Lyudmila and Nadya were already in bed, the telephone rang.

  ‘Hello,’ said a quiet voice. Viktor felt an even greater excitement than he had earlier in the day.

  ‘Hello,’ he answered.

  ‘I need to hear your voice. Say something to me.’

  ‘Masha, Mashenka,’ Viktor began. Then he fell silent.

  ‘Viktor, darling,’ she said. ‘I can’t lie to Pyotr Lavrentyevich. I told him I love you. I promised never to see you.’

  The following morning Lyudmila came into the room, ruffled his hair, kissed him on the forehead and said: ‘Did you phone someone last night? I thought
I heard you in my sleep.’

  ‘No, you must have been dreaming,’ said Viktor, looking her straight in the eye.

  ‘Don’t forget. You have to go and see the house-manager.’

  Footnotes

  fn1 The famous writer was Boris Pasternak, his comrade Osip Mandelstam.

  42

  The investigator’s jacket looked strange to Krymov, accustomed as he was to a world of soldiers’ tunics and military uniforms. His face, however, was quite ordinary; Krymov had seen any number of political officers whose faces had the same sallow colour.

  The first questions were easy enough; it began to seem as though the whole thing would be as straightforward as his first name, patronymic and surname.

  The prisoner answered the investigator’s questions quickly, as though anxious to assist him. After all, the investigator didn’t know anything about him. The official-looking table that stood between them in no way divided them. They had both paid their Party membership dues, both watched the film Chapayev and both listened to briefings by the Central Committee; they had both been sent to make speeches in the factories during the week before May Day.

  There were a number of preliminary questions and Krymov began to feel more at ease. Soon they would get to the heart of the matter and he would explain how he had led his men out of encirclement.

  Finally it was established beyond doubt that the unshaven creature sitting at the desk in a soldier’s open-collared tunic and a pair of trousers with the buttons torn off had a first name, patronymic and surname, had been born in the autumn, was of Russian nationality, had fought in two World Wars and one Civil War, had not been a member of any White Army bands, had not been involved in any court cases, had been a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) for twenty-five years, had been chosen as a delegate to a Comintern Congress and to the Pacific Ocean Trade Union Congress, and had not been awarded any orders or medals.

  Krymov’s main anxiety was centred on his time in encirclement, on the men he had led across the bogs of Byelorussia and the fields of the Ukraine.

  Which of them had been arrested? Which of them had broken down under interrogation, had lost all sense of conscience? Krymov was taken aback by a sudden question concerning other, more distant, years.

  ‘Tell me, when did you first become acquainted with Fritz Hacken?’

  After a long silence, he replied:

  ‘If I’m not mistaken, it was at the Central Trade Union Headquarters, in Tomsky’s office. In spring 1927, if I’m not mistaken.’

  The investigator nodded as though he had already known about this far-distant event. He sighed, opened a file inscribed ‘To be kept in perpetuity’, slowly loosened the white tapes and began leafing through pages covered in writing. Krymov caught a glimpse of different colours of ink, single- and double-spaced typescript and occasional appended notes in red and blue crayon and ordinary pencil.

  The investigator turned the pages over slowly; he was like a prize-winning student glancing through a textbook, already certain he knows it from cover to cover. Sometimes he glanced at Krymov. At these moments he was like an artist checking his sketch against the model: the physical characteristics, the moral characteristics, even the window of the soul – the eyes . . .

  But how evil he looked now. His very ordinary face – since 1937 Krymov had seen many such faces in raykoms, obkoms, district police stations, libraries and publishing houses – suddenly lost its ordinariness. He seemed to be made up of distinct cubes that had yet to be gathered into the unity of a human being. His eyes were on one cube, his slow hands on another; his mouth that kept opening to ask questions was on a third. Sometimes the cubes got mixed up and out of proportion. His mouth became vast, his eyes were set in his wrinkled forehead and his forehead was in the place that should have been occupied by his chin.

  ‘So that’s what happened,’ said the investigator. His face became human again. He closed the file, but without tying up the curling tapes.

  ‘Like a shoe with the laces undone,’ thought the creature with no buttons on his trousers.

  Very slowly and solemnly the investigator pronounced the words, ‘The Communist International.’ Then, in his usual voice: ‘Nikolay Krymov, Comintern official.’ And then, slowly, solemnly: ‘The Third Communist International.’ After that he remained silent for some time, apparently lost in thought.

  Then, with sudden animation, in a frank, man-to-man voice, he said:

  ‘That Muska Grinberg’s a dangerous woman, isn’t she?’

  Krymov blushed, surprised and deeply embarrassed.

  Yes! But what a long time ago that had been – even if he was still embarrassed. He must have already been in love with Zhenya. He had dropped in on an old friend after work. It must have been to return some money he had borrowed to go on a journey. After that he could remember everything clearly, without any ‘must have’s. His friend Konstantin had been out . . . But he had never really liked her – a woman with the hoarse voice of a chain-smoker, whose judgments were always sweeping and assured. She was the Deputy Party Secretary in the Institute of Philosophy. She was, admittedly, beautiful – ‘a fine figure of a woman’. Yes, he had indeed pawed Kostya’s wife on the couch. They’d even met a couple of times afterwards . . .

  An hour before, he had thought that his investigator knew nothing about him, that he had recently been promoted from some village. But time passed and the investigator kept on asking questions about the foreign Communists who had been Krymov’s comrades; he knew the familiar forms of their forenames, their nicknames, the names of their wives and lovers. There was something sinister in the extent of his knowledge. Even if Krymov had been a very great man, whose every word was important to history, it would still not have been worth gathering so many trifles, so much junk, into this great file.

  But nothing was considered trifling.

  Wherever he had been, he had left footprints behind him: a whole retinue had followed on his heels, committing his life to memory.

  A mocking remark he had made about one of his comrades, a word or two about a book he had read, a comic toast he had made on someone’s birthday, a three-minute telephone conversation, an angry note he had addressed to the platform at a conference – everything had been gathered together into the file.

  A great State had busied itself over his affair with Muska Grinberg. Meaningless trifles and empty, careless words had become intertwined with his deepest convictions; his love for Yevgenia Nikolaevna didn’t mean anything – what mattered were his most casual, shallow affairs. He himself could no longer distinguish between what was important and what was trivial. One disrespectful remark he had made about Stalin’s knowledge of philosophy appeared to mean more than ten years of ceaseless work on behalf of the Party. Had he really, in 1932, in Lozovsky’s office, told a visiting comrade from Germany that the Soviet Trade Union Movement represented the State more than the proletariat? A visiting comrade who had informed on him?

  Heavens, what a tissue of lies it all was! A cobweb that was gumming up his mouth and nostrils.

  ‘Please understand, comrade investigator . . .’

  ‘Citizen investigator.’

  ‘Yes, of course – citizen. Please – this is just a lie, a fabrication. I’ve been a Party member for more than twenty-five years. I incited soldiers to mutiny in 1917. I was four years in China. I worked day and night. Hundreds of people know me . . . In the present war I volunteered for the front. Even at the worst moments, people trusted me and followed me . . . I . . .’

  ‘Do you think you’re here to receive a testimonial?’ asked the investigator. ‘Are you applying for a citation?’ He shook his head. ‘And he even has the nerve to complain that his wife doesn’t bring him any parcels. What a husband!’

  That was something he had mentioned to Bogoleev in their cell. Oh God! He remembered that Katsenelenbogen had once joked: ‘A certain Greek once said, “All things flow”; we say, “All people inform”.’

  Inside the fil
e, his life had somehow lost its proportions, lost its true scale. The whole of his life had coagulated into grey, sticky vermicelli and he no longer knew what mattered: his four exhausting years of underground work in the sultry heat of Shanghai, the river-crossing at Stalingrad, his faith in the Revolution – or a few exasperated words he had said at ‘The Pines’ sanatorium, to a journalist he didn’t know very well, about the wretchedness of Soviet newspapers.

  And then, in a quiet, good-natured tone of voice, the investigator said:

  ‘And now tell me how the Fascist Hacken inveigled you into sabotage and espionage.’

  ‘You don’t mean that seriously, do you?’

  ‘Don’t play the fool, Krymov. You’ve already seen that we know every step of your life.’

  ‘But, that’s just why . . .’

  ‘Cut it out, Krymov. You can’t fool the security organs.’

  ‘But the whole thing’s a lie.’

  ‘Listen, Krymov. We’ve got Hacken’s own confession. He repented of his crime and told us of his criminal association with you.’

  ‘You can show me ten of Hacken’s confessions. They’re all forgeries. It’s madness! And if you have got this confession of Hacken’s, then why was I, a spy and a saboteur, trusted to act as a military commissar, to lead people into battle? What were you doing then, where were you looking?’

  ‘So you think you’ve been called here to teach us how to do our work, do you? You want to supervise the work of the organs?’

  ‘What’s all that got to do with it? It’s just a matter of logic. I know Hacken. He couldn’t have said he recruited me. It’s not possible.’