Life And Fate

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 file, 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.'

'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.