Life And Fate

'Nothing special. He just asked if I was having difficulty in obtaining foreign research literature,' said Viktor, trying to sound calm and unconcerned.

For a moment he felt almost embarrassed at his sudden feeling of happiness.

'Lyuda, Lyuda,' he said. 'Just think! I didn't repent. I didn't bow down. I didn't write to him. He phoned me himself.'

The impossible had happened. Its significance was incalculable. Was this really the same Viktor Pavlovich who had tossed about in bed and been unable to sleep, who had lost his head over some questio

'My God, my God!' said Lyudmila. 'And to think that Tolya will never know!' She went to Tolya's room and opened the door.

Viktor picked up the telephone receiver and put it down again.

'But what if the whole thing was a hoax?' he said, going over to the window.

The street was deserted. A woman went by, dressed in a quilted coat.

He returned to the telephone and drummed on the receiver with his finger. 'How did my voice sound?'

'You spoke very slowly. You know, I've no idea what made me suddenly stand up like that.'

'Stalin himself!'

'Perhaps it really was just a hoax?'

'No one would dare. You'd get ten years for a joke like that.'

It was only an hour since Viktor had been pacing up and down the room, humming the old romance by Golenishchev-Kutuzov:

'… he lies forgotten, quite alone…'

Stalin and his telephone calls! Rumours would go round Moscow once or twice every year: 'Stalin's phoned Dovzhenko, the film director! Stalin's phoned Ilya Ehrenburg!'

There was no need for Stalin to give direct orders – to ask that a prize be awarded to X, a flat be allocated to Y, or an Institute be set up for Z. Stalin was above such matters; they were dealt with by subordinates who divined Stalin's will through his tone of voice and the look in his eyes. If Stalin gave a man a quick smile, his life would be transformed overnight; he would suddenly rise up out of the outer darkness to be greeted with power, fame and showers of honours. Dozens of notables would bow down before him – Stalin had smiled at him, Stalin had joked with him on the phone.

People repeated these conversations to one another in detail; every word of Stalin's seemed astonishing. And the more banal his words, the more astonishing they seemed. It was as if Stalin was incapable of saying anything ordinary.

Apparently he had phoned a famous sculptor and said, laughing:

'Hello, you old drunkard!'

He had rung a famous writer, a very decent man, and asked about a comrade of his who had been arrested. Taken aback, the writer had mumbled something quite inaudible in reply. Stalin had then said: 'You don't know how to defend your friends.' [51]

He had phoned up a newspaper for the young. The deputy editor had said: 'Bubyekin speaking.'

'And who is Bubyekin?' Stalin had asked.

'You should know,' Bubyekin had answered. He had then slammed down the receiver.

Stalin had called back and said: 'Comrade Bubyekin, this is Stalin speaking. Please explain who you are.'

After this, Bubyekin had apparently spent two weeks in hospital recovering from shock.

One word of his could a

One night Stalin and Beria had visited an Old Bolshevik from Georgia who had recently been released from the Lubyanka; they had stayed till morning. The other tenants hadn't dared use the toilet and hadn't even gone out to work in the morning. The door had been opened by a midwife, the senior tenant. She was wearing a nightdress and holding a pug-dog in her arms; she was very angry that the visitors hadn't rung the bell the correct number of times. As she put it herself: 'I opened the door and saw a portrait. Then the portrait started walking towards me.' Apparently Stalin had gone out into the corridor and looked for a long time at the sheet of paper by the phone where the tenants noted how many calls they had made.

It was the very banality of all these incidents that people found so amusing – and so unbelievable. Just imagine! Stalin himself had walked down the corridor of a communal flat.

It was unbelievable. It needed only one word from Stalin for vast buildings to rise up, for columns of people to march out into the taiga and fell trees, for hundreds of thousands of men and women to dig canals, build towns and lay down roads in a land of permafrost and polar darkness. He was the embodiment of a great State. The Sun of the Stalinist Constitution… The Party of Stalin… Stalin's five-year plans… Stalin's construction works… Stalin's strategy… Stalin's aviation… A great State was embodied in him, in his character, in his ma

'I wish you success in your work…,' Viktor kept repeating. 'You're working in a very interesting field…'

One thing was quite clear: Stalin knew about the importance attributed to nuclear physics in other countries.

Viktor was aware of the strange tension that was begi

Chepyzhin, Sokolov and Markov had discussed this more than once. Only the other day Chepyzhin had talked about the shortsightedness of people who couldn't see the practical application of the reactions of heavy nuclei to bombardment by neutrons. He himself had chosen not to work in this field…

The air was still full of the fire and smoke of battle, the rumble of tanks and the tramping of boots, but a new, still silent tension had appeared in the world. The most powerful of all hands had picked up a telephone receiver; a theoretical physicist had heard a slow voice say: 'I wish you success in your work.'

A new shadow, still faint and mute, barely perceptible, now hung over the ravaged earth, over the heads of children and old men. No one knew of it yet, no one was aware of the birth of a power that belonged to the future.

It was a long way from the desks of a few dozen physicists, from sheets of paper covered with alphas, betas, gammas, ksis and sigmas, from laboratories and library shelves to the cosmic and satanic force that was to become the sceptre of State power. Nevertheless, the journey had been begun; the mute shadow was thickening, slowly turning into a darkness that could envelop both Moscow and New York.

Viktor didn't think at this moment about the success of his work -work that had seemed abandoned for ever in the drawer of his writing-desk, but which would now once again see the light and be incorporated into lectures and scientific papers. Nor did he think about the triumph of scientific truth; nor about how he could once again help the progress of science, have his own students, be mentioned in the pages of textbooks and journals, wait anxiously to see whether his theory corresponded to the truth revealed by calculating machines and photographic emulsions.

[51] The famous writer was Boris Pasternak, his comrade Osip Mandelstam.