Vasily Grossman - Life And Fate

All he really wanted was to take off his boots, lie down, put up his bare feet, and scratch himself in his sleep.

Quietly, almost affectionately, the investigator said:

'Why won't you help us? Do you really think it's just a matter of whether or not you committed crimes before the war, whether or not you renewed contacts and agreed on rendezvous during the time you were surrounded? It's something more serious and deep-rooted than that. It's a matter of the new direction of the Party. You must help the Party in this new stage of its struggle. To do that, you must first renounce your past opinions. Only a Bolshevik is capable of such a task. That's why I'm talking to you now.'

'Very well,' Krymov said slowly and sleepily. 'I can allow that, in spite of myself, I may have given expression to views hostile to the Party. My own internationalism may have contradicted the policies of a sovereign Socialist State. I may have been out of touch with the way things were going after 1937, out of touch with the new people. Yes, I can admit all this. But espionage, sabotage…'

'Why that "but"? Can't you see that you're already on the way towards realizing your hostility to the cause of the Party? What does the mere form matter? Why that "but", when you've already admitted what's most important?'

'No, I deny that I'm a spy.'

'So you don't want to help the Party? Just when we get to the point, you try and hide. It's like that, is it? You're shit, real dogshit!'

Krymov jumped up, grabbed the investigator's tie, and banged his fist on the table. Something inside the telephone clicked and tinkled.

'You son of a bitch, you swine,' he cried out in a piercing howl, 'where were you when I led people into battle in the Ukraine and the Bryansk forests? Where were you during the winter I was fighting outside Voronezh? Were you ever in Stalingrad, you bastard? Who are you to say I never did anything for the Party? I suppose you were defending our Motherland here in the Lubyanka, you… you Tsarist gendarme! And you don't believe I fought for Socialism in Stalingrad! Were you ever nearly executed in Shanghai? Were you shot in the left shoulder by one of Kolchak's soldiers in 1917?'

After that he was beaten up. He wasn't just beaten up any old how; he wasn't just punched in the face like in the Special Section at the front; he was beaten up carefully, intelligently, by two young men in new uniforms who had an understanding of anatomy and physiology. As they beat him up, he shouted:

'You swine, you should be sent to a penal detachment… You should be sent to face a tank-attack with nothing but rifles… Deserters…'

They carried on with their work, quite without anger and leaving nothing to chance. They didn't seem to be hitting him at all hard, to be putting any force behind their punches; nevertheless, there was something terrible about each blow, just as there is in a wounding remark delivered with icy calm.

They hadn't once hit Krymov in the teeth, but blood was pouring out of his mouth. The blood hadn't come from his nose or his jaw; it wasn't that he had bitten his tongue like in Akhtuba… This was blood from deep inside him, blood from his lungs. He could no longer remember where he was or what was happening to him… Then he caught sight of the investigator's face looming over him; he was pointing at the portrait of Gorky above the desk and asking: 'What was it the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky once said?'

He answered his question himself, sounding like a schoolmaster again: 'If an enemy won't yield, he must be destroyed.'

After that Krymov saw a light on the ceiling and a man with narrow epaulettes.

'Very well,' said the investigator. 'You don't need any more rest, thanks to medical science.'

Soon Krymov was back at the desk, listening to the investigator's wise exhortations.

'We can sit like this for a week, a month, a whole year… Let me put things very simply for you. You may not be guilty but you can still sign what I tell you to. Then you won't be beaten up any more. Is that clear? You may be sentenced by the Special Commission but you won't be beaten up again – and that's quite something! Do you think I enjoy seeing you being beaten up? And we'll let you sleep. Do you understand?'

Time passed; the interrogation dragged on. It seemed as though nothing would be able to shock Krymov out of his stupor now. Nevertheless, the investigator did once make him jerk back his head and gape at him in astonishment.

'These are all things that happened a long time ago,' said the investigator, pointing at Krymov's file. 'We can forget about them. But what we cannot forget is your base treachery towards the Motherland during the battle for Stalingrad. Our witnesses and documents all say the same thing. You tried to weaken the political consciousness of the soldiers in the surrounded house 6/1. You incited Grekov, a true patriot, to treachery: you tried to make him go over to the enemy. You betrayed the trust shown in you both by the Party and by your commanding officers when they chose to send you to this house as a military commissar. How did you behave when you got there? Like an enemy agent!'

Krymov was beaten up again in the small hours. He seemed to be drowning in warm black milk. Once again the man with the narrow epaulettes nodded as he wiped the needle of his syringe. Once again the investigator said: 'Well then, thanks to medical science…'

They were sitting opposite one another again. Krymov looked at the investigator's tired face and felt surprised at his own lack of anger. Could he really have seized this same man by the tie and tried to strangle him? Now he was beginning to feel quite close to his investigator again. The desk no longer separated them from one another: they were two comrades, two disappointed men.

Suddenly Krymov remembered how the man in bloodstained underwear who hadn't been shot properly had come back from the steppe at night, back to the Front Special Section.

'That's my fate too,' he thought. 'I've got nowhere to go. It's too late.'

Later he asked to go to the lavatory. The captain from the previous day appeared again. He raised the blind, turned out the light and lit a cigarette.

Once again Krymov saw the light of day, a sullen light that seemed to come not from the sun, or even the sky, but from the grey brick of the Inner Prison.

The other bunks were all empty: his neighbours must have been transferred to another cell, or else they were being interrogated.

He lay there, frayed. He was quite lost; his whole life had been smeared with filth. He had a terrible pain in the small of his back; they must have injured his kidneys.

At this bitter moment, his whole life shattered, he understood the power of a woman's love. A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more they lacerated his soul, the more revolting and contemptible he became to the world, the more she would love him. She would run after a truck; she would wait in the queues on Kuznetsky Most, or even by the camp boundary-fence, desperate to hand over a few sweets or an onion; she would bake shortbread for him on an oil-stove; she would give whole years of her life just to be able to see him for half an hour…

Not every woman you sleep with can be called a wife.

The despair that cut into him like a knife made him want to reduce someone else to despair.

He composed several lines of a letter to her: 'Doubtless you were glad to hear what has happened, not because I have been crushed, but because you managed to run away from me in time; you must be blessing your rat's instinct that made you desert a sinking ship… I am alone…'