Life and Fate

by Vasily Grossman

‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s a Communist, a fighter for the Revolution.’

  ‘Have you always been certain of that?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Krymov. ‘Always.’

  Nodding his head, the investigator leafed through the file, repeating to himself in apparent confusion: ‘Well, that does change things, that does change things . . .’

  Then he held out a sheet of paper to Krymov, covering part of it with the palm of his hand. ‘Read through that.’

  Krymov read what was written and shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘It’s pretty poor stuff,’ he said, raising his eyes from the page.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The man’s neither brave enough to declare firmly that Hacken’s an honest Communist, nor is he cowardly enough to level accusations against him. So he worms his way out of saying anything.’

  The investigator took his hand away and showed Krymov his own signature next to the date, February 1938.

  They both fell silent. Then the investigator asked sternly:

  ‘Perhaps you were being beaten then and that’s why you gave such testimony.’

  ‘No, no one beat me.’

  The investigator’s face broke up into separate cubes: his eyes watched Krymov with exasperated contempt, while his mouth said:

  ‘And so, during the time you were encircled, you left your unit for two days. You were taken by air to the German Army HQ where you handed over important information and received your new instructions.’

  ‘Raving nonsense,’ muttered the creature in the soldier’s tunic with the unbuttoned collar.

  The investigator carried on. Now Krymov no longer saw himself as a man of high principles, strong, clear-minded, ready to go to the scaffold for the sake of the Revolution. Instead he felt weak and indecisive; he had said things he shouldn’t; he had allowed himself to mock the reverence of the Soviet people for comrade Stalin. He had been undiscriminating in his associates: many of his friends had been victims of repression. His theoretical views were totally confused. He had slept with his friend’s wife. He had given cowardly, dishonest testimony about Hacken.

  Was it really him sitting here? Was all this really happening to him? It was a dream, a midsummer nightmare . . .

  ‘Before the war you supplied an émigré Trotskyist centre with information about the thinking of leading figures in the international revolutionary movement.’

  You didn’t have to be a scoundrel or an idiot to suspect such a filthy, pathetic creature of treachery. If Krymov had been in the investigator’s shoes, he certainly wouldn’t have trusted such a creature . . . He knew the new type of Party official very well – those who had replaced the Old Bolsheviks liquidated or dismissed from their posts in 1937. They were people of a very different stamp. They read new books and they read them in a different way: they didn’t read them, they ‘mugged them up’. They loved and valued material comforts: revolutionary asceticism was alien to them, or, at the very least, not central to their character. They knew no foreign languages, were infatuated with their own Russian-ness – and spoke Russian ungrammatically. Some of them were by no means stupid, but their power seemed to lie not so much in their ideas or intelligence, as in their practical competence and the bourgeois sobriety of all their opinions.

  Krymov could understand that both the new and the old cadres were bound together by a great common goal, that this gave rise to many similarities, and that it was unity that mattered, not differences. Nevertheless, he had always been conscious of his own superiority over these new people, the superiority that was his as an Old Bolshevik.

  What he hadn’t noticed was that it was no longer a matter of his own willingness to accept the investigator, to recognize him as a fellow Party member. Now his longing to be one with his investigator was really a pathetic hope that the latter would accept him, would accept Nikolay Grigorevich Krymov, or would at least admit that not everything about him was wretched, dishonest and insignificant.

  Krymov hadn’t noticed how it had happened, but now it was his investigator’s self-assurance that was the assurance of a true Communist.

  ‘If you are genuinely capable of sincere repentance, if you still feel any love at all for the Party, then help the Party with your confession.’

  Suddenly, shaking off the terrible impotence that was eating into his cerebral cortex, Krymov shouted: ‘No, you won’t get anything out of me! I’m not going to give false testimony! Do you hear? I won’t sign even if you torture me!’

  ‘Think about it for a while,’ said the investigator.

  He began leafing through some papers. He didn’t once look at Krymov. The minutes went by. He moved Krymov’s file to one side and took a sheet of paper out of a drawer. He seemed to have forgotten about Krymov. He was writing calmly, unhurriedly, screwing up his eyes as he collected his thoughts. Then he read through what he had written, thought about it, took an envelope out of a drawer and started writing an address on it. It was possible that this wasn’t an official letter at all. He read through the address and underlined the surname twice. He filled his fountain-pen, spending a long time wiping off the drops of ink. He began sharpening pencils over an ashtray. The lead in one of the pencils kept breaking. Without showing the least sign of irritation, the investigator began sharpening it again. Then he tried the point on his finger.

  Meanwhile the creature thought. It had a lot to think about.

  How can there have been so many informers? I must remember everything. I must work out who can have denounced me. But why bother? Muska Grinberg . . . The investigator will come to Zhenya in time . . . But it is strange that he hasn’t asked about her at all, that he hasn’t said a word . . . Surely Vasya didn’t inform on me? But what, just what am I supposed to confess . . . ? What’s hidden will remain hidden, but here I am. Tell me what all this is for, Party. Iosif, Koba, Soso. What can have made him kill so many fine, strong people? Katsenelenbogen’s right – it’s not the investigator’s questions I should be afraid of, but his silences, the things he keeps silent about. Yes, soon he’ll come to Zhenya. She must have been arrested too. Where had all this started, how had it begun? Can it really be me sitting here? How awful. What a lot of shit there is in my life. Forgive me, comrade Stalin! Just say one word to me, Iosif Vissarionovich! I’m guilty, I’ve been confused, I’ve said things I shouldn’t, I’ve doubted, the Party knows everything, the Party sees everything. Why, why did I ever talk to that literary critic? What does it matter anyway? But how does my time in encirclement fit into all this? The whole thing’s quite mad. It’s a lie, a slander, a provocation. Why on earth didn’t I say about Hacken, ‘My brother, my friend, I have no doubt at all of your purity . . .’? Hacken had averted his unhappy eyes.

  Suddenly the investigator asked: ‘Well, have you remembered yet?’

  Krymov threw up his hands helplessly. ‘There isn’t anything for me to remember.’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Hello.’ The investigator glanced cursorily at Krymov. ‘Yes, you can get everything ready. It will soon be time.’ For a moment Krymov thought the conversation was about him.

  The investigator put down the receiver and picked it up again. The ensuing conversation was extraordinary: it was as though the creature sitting next to the investigator were not a man, but some quadruped.

  He was obviously talking to his wife. First of all they discussed household matters: ‘At the special store? Goose – that’s fine. But they should have given it to you on your first coupon. Sergey’s wife rang the department. She got a leg of lamb on her first coupon. They’ve asked us . . . By the way I got some cottage cheese in the canteen. Eight hundred grams. No, it’s not sour . . . How’s the gas been today? And don’t forget about the suit.’

  After this he said: ‘Well then, take care, don’t miss me too much. Did you dream about me? What did I look like? In my underpants again? Pity! Well, I’ll teach you a thing or two when I get home. Now you be careful – housework’s all very well, but you mustn
’t lift anything heavy.’

  There was something improbable about how very bourgeois and ordinary it all was: the more normal, the more human the conversation, the less the speaker seemed like a human being. There’s something ghastly about a monkey imitating the ways of a man . . . At the same time Krymov had a clear sense that he himself was no longer a human being – when had people ever had conversations like this in front of a third person . . . ? ‘Want a big fat kiss? No? Oh well . . .’

  Of course, if Bogoleev’s theory was correct, if Krymov was a Persian cat, a frog, a goldfinch or a beetle on a stick, then there wasn’t anything in the least surprising about this conversation.

  Towards the end, the investigator said: ‘Something burning? Run then, run. So long.’

  Then he took out a book and a writing pad and began to read. From time to time he noted something down in pencil. He might be preparing for a meeting of some study-group, or perhaps he was going to give a lecture . . .

  Suddenly, in extreme exasperation, he said: ‘Why do you keep tapping your feet like that? This isn’t a gymnastics exhibition.’

  ‘I’ve got pins and needles, citizen investigator.’

  But the investigator had already buried himself again in his book.

  After another ten minutes he asked absent-mindedly: ‘Well? Have you remembered?’

  ‘Citizen investigator, I need to go to the lavatory.’

  The investigator sighed, walked to the door and gave a quiet call. His face was just like that of a dog-owner whose dog asks to go out for a walk at the wrong time. A young soldier in battledress walked in. Krymov looked him up and down with a practised eye: everything was in order – his belt was properly tucked in, his collar was clean and his forage cap was tilted at the right angle. It was only his work that was not that of a soldier.

  Krymov got up. His feet were numb from sitting so long on the chair; at his first steps they almost gave way under him. He thought hurriedly, both while he was in the lavatory with the soldier watching him, and on his way back. He had a lot to think about.

  When he got back the investigator was no longer there. A young man was sitting in his place. He had a captain’s blue epaulettes on his uniform, bordered with red braid. He looked sullenly at Krymov as though he had known and hated him all his life.

  ‘What are you standing up for?’ he barked. ‘Go on, sit down. And sit up straight, you sod. You’ll catch it in the guts if you keep on slouching like that. That’ll straighten you out.’

  ‘So now we’ve introduced ourselves,’ thought Krymov. He felt terrified, more terrified than he had ever felt during the war.

  ‘Now it’s going to begin in earnest,’ he thought.

  The captain let out a cloud of tobacco smoke. Through the haze, his voice continued: ‘Here’s a pen and some paper. Do you think I’m going to do your writing for you?’

  The captain obviously enjoyed insulting him. Or was he just doing his duty? Perhaps he was like an artillery officer ordered to keep on firing day and night simply to fray the enemy’s nerves.

  ‘Don’t slouch like that! Do you think you’re here to have a good sleep?’

  A few minutes later the captain shouted: ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Have you gone deaf?’

  He went up to the window, raised the black-out blind and switched off the light. A grey morning looked gloomily into Krymov’s eyes. It was the first time he had seen daylight since he had arrived in the Lubyanka.

  ‘So we’ve whiled the whole night away,’ he thought.

  Had he ever known a worse morning? Had he really, only a few weeks ago, been lying in a bomb-crater, happy and free, while friendly pieces of iron whistled over his head?

  Time had become confused: it was only very recently that he had left Stalingrad, yet he had been sitting here in this office for an interminable length of time.

  What a grey, stony light it was. The windows looked out onto the central pit of the Inner Prison. It wasn’t light at all – it was just dirty water. Objects looked still more hostile, still more sullen and official than they had under the electric light.

  No, it wasn’t that his boots were too small; it was simply that his feet had swollen.

  How had his past life and work become linked to the time he had been surrounded in 1941? Whose fingers had joined together things that could never be joined? And what was this for? Who needed all this? Why?

  His thoughts burned so fiercely that there were moments when he quite forgot the aching pain in his spine and the small of his back. He no longer even felt how his swollen legs were bursting open the tops of his boots.

  Fritz Hacken . . . How could he forget that in 1938 he had been sitting in a room just like this? Yes, but there was something very different in the way he had been sitting then – inside his pocket he had had a pass. What was worst of all was the way he had been so anxious to please everyone – the official in charge of issuing passes, the janitors, the lift attendant in military uniform. The investigator had said: ‘Comrade Krymov, please assist us.’

  No, there was something still more vile – his desire to be sincere! Yes, now he did remember. All that had been required of him was sincerity. And he had indeed been sincere: he had remembered Hacken’s mistaken appraisal of the Spartakist movement, the ill-will he had felt towards Thälman, the way he had wanted royalties for his book, the way he had divorced Else when Else was pregnant . . . He had, of course, remembered good things as well . . . The investigator had noted down the sentence: ‘On the basis of many years’ acquaintance I consider it improbable that he should have been involved in any direct sabotage against the Party; nevertheless, I am not able totally to exclude the possibility that he is a double agent . . .’

  Yes. He had informed . . . Yes, and all the information about him in this file – this file that was to be kept in perpetuity – had been gathered from comrades of his who had also no doubt wished to be sincere. Why had he wanted to be sincere? His duty towards the Party? Nonsense! The really sincere thing to do would have been to bang his fist furiously on the table and shout: ‘Hacken’s my brother, my friend. He’s innocent!’ But instead he had fumbled about in odd corners of his memory, catching fleas, remembering all kinds of trifles, playing up to the man without whose signature his permit to leave the large grey building would remain invalid. He could remember very well his happy, greedy feeling when the investigator had said to him: ‘Just a minute, comrade Krymov, let me sign your pass for you.’ He himself had helped to pull the noose round Hacken’s neck. And where had the seeker after truth gone when his exit-pass had been signed and validated? Hadn’t it been to see Muska Grinberg, the wife of his friend? But then everything he had said about Hacken was true. Maybe, but then so was everything that had been said about him. He really had told Fedya Yevseev that Stalin had an inferiority complex about his ignorance of philosophy. Even the mere list of people he had associated with was quite terrifying: Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin, Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev, Lomov, Shatskin, Pyatnitsky, Lominadze, Ryutin, Shlyapnikov with the red hair; he’d been to the Institute to see Lev Borisovich Deborin in the ‘Academy’; Lashevich, Yan Gamarnik, Luppol; he’d been to the Institute to see Ryazanov when he was an old man; he’d twice stayed with his old friend Ekhe when he was in Siberia; and then in their day he’d seen Skrypnik in Kiev, Stanislav Kossior in Kharkhov, and Ruth Fischer; and yes . . . Well, thank God the investigator hadn’t mentioned the most important thing of all: Trotsky himself had thought well of him . . .

  He was rotten all the way through. Why though? And were they any more guilty than he was? But he hadn’t signed any confessions. Just wait, Nikolay, you will! Just like they did! Probably the real horrors are kept till later. They keep you for three days without sleep and then start beating you up. None of this seems much like Socialism, does it? Why does my Party need to destroy me? We were the ones who made the Revolution – not Malenkov, Zhdanov and Shcherbakov. We were merciless towards the enemies of the Revolution. Why has the Revolution b
een so merciless towards us? Perhaps for that very reason. Or maybe it hasn’t got anything to do with the Revolution. What’s this captain got to do with the Revolution? He’s just a thug, a member of the Black Hundreds.

  There he had been, just milling the wind, while time had been passing.

  He was exhausted. The pain in his back and legs was crushing him . . . All he wanted was to lie down on his bunk, stick his legs in the air, flex his bare toes, scratch his calves.

  ‘Stay awake!’ shouted the captain, for all the world as though he were shouting out orders in battle.

  It was as though the Front would break and the whole Soviet State collapse if Krymov were to close his eyes for one moment.

  Krymov had never in all his life heard so many swear-words.

  His friends, his closest associates, his secretaries, the people he had had the most intimate conversations with, had gathered together his every word and action. He was appalled when he remembered, ‘Ivan was the only person I told about that’; ‘That was when I was talking to Grishka – I’ve known him since 1920’; ‘That was when I was talking to Mashka Kheltser, oh Mashka, Mashka!’

  Suddenly he remembered the investigator saying that he shouldn’t expect any parcels from Yevgenia Nikolaevna . . . That was a reference to a conversation in his cell with Bogoleev. People had been adding to the Krymov collection as recently as that.

  In the afternoon someone brought him some soup. His hand was trembling so badly that he had to bend forward and sip from the rim of the bowl, leaving the spoon tapping away by itself.

  ‘You eat like a pig,’ said the captain sadly.

  After that, one other thing happened: Krymov asked to go to the lavatory. This time he walked down the corridor without thinking anything at all, but he did have one thought as he stood over the lavatory-pan: it was a good thing his buttons had been ripped off – his fingers were far too shaky to be able to cope with fly-buttons.

  Time passed, slowly doing its work. The State – the captain and his epaulettes – was victorious. A dense grey fog filled Krymov’s head. It was probably the same fog that filled the brain of a monkey. Past and future had disappeared; even the file with its curling tapes had disappeared. There was only one thing left in the world – his need to take off his boots, have a good scratch and go to sleep.